Shadow of a Black Soul
by Decius
Summary: Answer to Isabelle's challenge. Post Dead Things, Spike left Sunnydale. Buffy has gone to find him
1. Default Chapter

Buffy hugged the soft woollen coat around her, trying her best to ignore the shivering of every part of her body that was shaking her to her very core, though she knew that it was not merely the biting cold that was causing her to tremble like a child, frightened of the dark. She knew that she had travelled too far, and made too many sacrifices, to find the man she thought she might, maybe, love, and the imminence of seeing his face again was enough to send her heart through her stomach in a way that she had not known since she had first went to Los Angeles to see Angel.  
  
Angel. She spat the name in her mind as she struggled through the hard, caked snow of the barren streets of St.Petersburg, trying to ignore the malevolent attention that her Western garb was drawing from the starving, freezing beggars who held out their hands in front of well- practiced expressions of despair. Raised in opulence and comfort in California, she had seen little of true poverty besides those shows on past prime-time that she sometimes watched when she was bored, but she had seen enough of it in the last four months to write a post-graduate thesis. If she ever went back to college – hell, if she even survived long enough to think about it – she would study poverty, its causes and its effects. She wanted to know what kind of circumstances could drive people in far corners of the world to behave with the same uniform, ruthless, savagery. She thought that she had seen the depths of what the world could spew forth from years of living on the Hellmouth, but on her quest, she had learned that Sunnydale did not sit over the mouth of Hell. Hell, she had learned, was easily enough created by man on earth. In Sunnydale, the enemy was clear, the battlelines well drawn. Here, and in South America, and in Africa, and in Sicily, there were no lines of battle to mark her enemies for her, for there had not been a demon among them. All those who had tried to kill her, all of them that she had buried with increasing steel in her mind against the pangs of her conscience, all had been human. As she sidestepped agilely to avoid a drunk who snarled at her, she wondered idly why she had believed for so long that evil was the sole domain of the soulless. Humans were worse – most of them had the choice.  
  
Choice.  
  
Had he not, too, made a choice, only one infinitely more difficult? It was easy for men and women to start down the road of the damned, for they were ever but one step from the barbarity from which they had emerged but which was still locked in their genes as the first tool of instinct. But he had no such easy heritage on which to fall back. Childe of Drusilla, grand-childe of Angelus, of the line of Nest, of the Order of Aurelius. A heritage steeped in evil, drenched in the blood of innumerable innocent lives. That was his burden. The strength that he had to possess to make the choice to reject that, and more, a century of evidence that the only joy could be found in the slaughter of humanity, was colossal. On the rare, secret moments when she prayed, she prayed to have the kind of strength that he had shown, and that she had refused to see until it was no longer in front of her.  
  
'Please, please, I have no money to feed my child,' a scruffy beggar pleaded with practiced despair, shaking her from her revery. She tried to ignore the woman, whose face was obscured by the driving snow and the thick, filthy shapka on her head. Buffy's Russian was good, learned quickly with a talent for linguistics that she had never known she had, but she did not wish to speak to this creature.  
  
'Please, lady, pleeease,' she whined at the muffled American girl, all the while her hardened eyes probing for any sign of conspicuous wealth. Despite the surprising strength of the girl, the beggar refused to relinquish her hold.  
  
'Get away from me,' Buffy snarled at her in passable, though heavily accented, Russian, throwing the woman from her with one flick of her wrist, sending the beggar tumbling to the ground in a roll stopped by the crumbling pavement. Buffy heard the snap of her ribs clearly, and the muffled cry of pain. She grinned tightly to herself. She knew from experience, though she was but two days in this pestilential remnant of the ambitions of Tsar Peter the Great, that the only way to ensure that she would not be bothered was to show a toughness, a willingness to resort to the most extreme depths of violence in order to be left alone. She had learned that lesson in Rio, though why she had ever thought that Spike would be in Rio she could not recall.  
  
The buildings overhead were towering, grey and bleak. Buffy grunted to herself as she walked, avoiding the refuse that was strewn on the streets, trying not to see that she was hemmed in on all sides by the graceless stone architecture of the old Soviet Union, knowing that she was as alien to this place as any creature of the night. It was not that she was American – being the Slayer meant that her sense of nationality was hazy at best, for she fought not for Americans but for everyone. It was that she was a creature of the sun, meant for light as a symbol of that for which she fought. And died, she thought ruefully. This place was her idea of hell on earth. It was the middle of the Russian winter, the same winter that had turned back Napoleon and defeated Hitler. Fifteen hours of continuous night. It was a vampire's dream come true, and it was for that reason that she struggled through the snow, the wind, the beggars, and the claustrophobia. This was a vampire's paradise. And the last place on earth that she could look for, she knew, if this came to nothing, she would return home and bury her heart in the same restless prison with the other emotions that she had learned, since her resurrection, to suppress. This was where the trail would run cold.  
  
She turned left, down a narrow side alley that led from the main road, quiet though it was. She knew where she was going – leaving Sunnydale and its familiar environment had triggered latent senses that she had never known that she had because she had never had need of them before. She could sniff the undead, now, she could taste their scent, as they could sense humans. There were precious few left in the Old World, now, they had come to prefer the glamour and easy living of the New. But still, there were some, and she had spent days tracking them since she had arrived here. There was a bar, nameless and anonymous. One thing held true for the world, from Buenos Aires to Kinshasa to Kowloon to Paris. Vampires loved bars.  
  
The building was nondescript, looking like nothing more than another useless and derelict holdover from the Soviet era. Overhead, there was nothing but a few badly nailed boards, no glitzy neon, no Budweiser sign. The door was heavily locked, but not so heavily that she would not have been able to kick it down, were she to so desire. It would not be necessary.  
  
'Papers,' the hulking vampire at the door demanded in a bored tone. He was not in game face, this was not Sunnydale or Los Angeles. She looked at him as a predator to prey. He sensed it, his eyes becoming wary, but he could also sense that it was not him that she was after, not this night. She smelled human, she knew, but more than human. Bouncers did not ask questions like that.  
  
'Don't have any,' she replied, equally bored, looking him straight in the eye. She tilted her head to the right. 'Want to give me yours? I'll keep them as a souvenir when I rip off your head if you don't let me in.'  
  
He looked at her, hard, but he could sense that she had the force to back the deadly serious words. With a quiet snarl, he pushed the door violently open, the cast iron crashing against the wall behind with a resounding shriek that was muffled by the screaming wind. Without a backward glance, she walked inside.  
  
It was like every other vampire bar the world over – dark, tasteless, badly lit and poorly maintained. Bloodsuckers could nor care less about creature comforts, the only vampire that she had ever met who did was Angel. Her face darkened as she made her way quietly through the thin crowd, swaying to the lack of harmony of the unoriginal heavy metal that boomed through the large, two-levelled chamber. Were it not for Angel, she would be at home, in bed with the man whose disappearance had taken her halfway across the world.  
  
She propped herself up against the bar, ignoring the hungry attention of the two vampires beside her. They, too, could sense that they were outmatched. It was the old fight-or-flight instinct that held true even after death. They knew what not to mess with, not this night and not this human. They pulled away, acting as though they wanted to. They didn't.  
  
She attracted the attention of the barman with an arrogant toss of her head, removing the shapka and tossing her blonde hair carelessly.  
  
'What'll it be?' he asked her.  
  
'Information.'  
  
'Not on sale here,' he replied, turning away, only to be pulled back, his head slammed against the bar with such force that it caused heads to turn halfway across the room despite the booming of the speakers.  
  
'I wasn't going to pay for it,' she told him sweetly. 'I'm looking for a vampire.'  
  
'Take your pick.'  
  
She twisted his head painfully, eliciting a grunt of pain. 'Not these. I'm looking for a Master.'  
  
'There's only one Master in town,' he gasped. She knew he was human. She didn't care a great deal, for the search was almost over, one way or another. 'Jur'Khan Chung, lord of the north. No other Masters allowed.'  
  
She tasted the sweet bile of disappointment, yet again, but swallowed it back. If there was ever a vampire who didn't care about the rules of even his own society, it was Spike, and no other would dictate to him where he could or could not go. Not even her.  
  
'Where will I find him?' 


	2. Chapter 2

A vampire emerged from the deep shadows behind her, appearing as though from thin air, though she had long accustomed herself to the ability of the undead to meld with any area devoid of light, better than any chameleon. She left the barman to his pain and his skull lacerated from the glass that she had broken on the bar, and turned slowly.  
  
Most of them in this room were barely better than fledglings, strutting around in game face, masking their inexperience with a show of brutality. She had seen their type so many times before, little more than bullies, little more than strong humans. The one that emerged at her shoulder was different – he radiated power and menace, though he made no hostile move.  
  
The light above from the shimmering bulb flickered on the dirty glass of the bar, casting a myriad of reflections onto the pale face that stared through her. The noise itself seemed to recede as he spoke. It was as though the room, and those pitiful creatures within it, didn't exist for either of them as she lost herself in those black, deadly eyes.  
  
He was slim, and well dressed, with short black hair, immaculately combed. His well-tailored suit was dark grey, his tie black, his shoes perfect. He was the embodiment of Anne Rice's conception of what vampires should be – dark, beautiful, immortal, and lethal.  
  
His voice was sibilant, but resonant at the same time. His eyes, black as the Pit, never left hers. She could feel herself falling into those eyes. Only one other that she had ever met could do that to her, and she had spent the last five months searching for him.  
  
'To stay in this city, you must do homage to the Lord of the North,' he told her, the cadence of his voice enticing, like a spider drawing a fly. 'Your reputation precedes you, Miss Summers. I am sure that Lord Jur'Khan Chung would welcome the homage of a Slayer.'  
  
The music stopped dead, the DJ, himself a vampire, having heard too what had been announced. The sudden break from the graceless pulses of hard rock was shattering. The only noise made was the hiss of needlessly indrawn breath as the bulk of the creatures in the room drew back as if from a sudden fire. Thoughts of mortality that they had been raised never to worry about began to surge through their minds. None left, yet, but there were few who did not glance at the door. They knew of Slayers, but were that all they would try their luck, the weak many against the strong one. But not this Slayer. Not Buffy Summers. They had heard of what she had done to the Master, to William the Bloody and his dark queen, to Angelus, and to Dracula. To them she was the worst nightmare come to life.  
  
She was aware of the reaction among the others, but she ignored it, and that sublime unconcern was enough to push several over the edge, and the they began filing towards the door in search of prey to bolster their egos, shattered this night by a frail wisp of a girl they had first thought to be easy meat.  
  
'Do you know where William the Bloody is?' she asked the handsome vampire who had spoken to her. He, too, had ignored the others as irrelevant.  
  
He looked at her for a long moment before answering, not moving at all. He was dark stone in the middle of a seedy vampire bar, like herself not belonging there but forced by circumstance to be present. 'I have not heard the name,' he told her. Vampires lied, she knew, as easily as a human breathed, but she sensed honesty in this one, and it was at least refreshing to encounter one who respected her strength enough to not challenge her. Again, she felt disappointment, but she would not let it end her. The rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover had told her specifically that Spike was in Russia, in this St.Petersburg. He had sworn to her, and she believed him.  
  
'Have you heard of him?'  
  
He nodded once, the barest inclination of his head. 'Most have,' he told her. 'But I know nothing of him, beyond the legends that have grown up over the years. I would know enough not to cross him. And I would know if he was here. He isn't. My lord, Jur'Khan Chung, would know, as he knew when you entered the city. No Master may hunt here without his permission.'  
  
A wave of relief swept through her. Spike would not be hunting. Unless he got the chip out, a treacherous voice whispered at the back of her mind, but she pushed it away. She would not entertain the darkest of her fantasies now, not when she was this close.  
  
'What if he were not hunting?' she asked as more of the others quietly left the bar to the freezing wind and snow outside.  
  
He smiled at her, genuine humour lighting his face. 'What if you were not breathing?' he replied. 'The question makes about as much sense.'  
  
'Answer it.'  
  
He shrugged. 'Then, maybe, he would escape detection. But he is well known. Someone would have seen him.' He cocked his head to the side. 'He must have done something exceptional for you to follow him this far.'  
  
'He is exceptional,' she told him coldly, her eyes mirrors of frost. She was done with this – she needed answers that this creature was not giving her. 'And I will find him.'  
  
Without time even to register shock on his pale, handsome face, he exploded into ash with the customary scream of the dead, his remains littering the bar lie grey snow, reflecting in the neon light of the bar. The other vampires looked on, shocked but knowing better than to interfere.  
  
'Without your help,' she told the scattered ashes that moments before had been an immortal. She turned to the fearful crown.  
  
'Where will I find Jur'Khan Chung?'  
  
  
  
The vampire known as the Gentleman observed the one he knew as Joachim entering the lair of Jur'Khan Chung, followed by the Slayer. His lip curled as he thought of the Mongol. He remembered the soldier from the siege of Kiev. He had been a coward then, and eight hundred years had not changed him. Still he clung to society, to his minions and his thralls, when all others his age had realised that to hunt alone was the fountain of all strength.  
  
  
  
She walked through the empty streets of the old capital of the Empire of the Tsars. The snow was no less fierce, the wind no less biting, but she barely noticed. She rubbed her stomach absently, though she could barely feel it through the heavy layers of clothing. She could feel Spike no more than she could have felt him when they were back in Sunnydale, secure in the mutuality of desire that had been thrust upon them by the caprice of Fate while bound in hatred that went to the core of their very beings - she was not so naïve that she did not believe that his pure hatred did not still simmer beneath his sincere belief of his love – but she knew that he was close, knew that the search was nearly finished. She would have known even had she not believed the earnestly, bitterly tendered word of the rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover. Something was drawing her to the East, something that had been pulling at her since she had started. Somehow, she knew that he was here.  
  
She doubted that he knew that she was, for she did not think that he could ever believe that she would follow him here.  
  
A shiver crawled up her spine slowly, chillingly. She stopped and turned, suddenly fearful.  
  
She knew when was being watched, and she knew when the watcher was not friendly.  
  
'He's coming for you, Slayer,' came a ghostly voice through the chill air, as though the noise of the wind did not exist, as though the voice was from another plain.  
  
'Who?' she asked, helplessly. There was something about that voice, something tantalisingly familiar, whose familiarity was too near to simply instinct and far from memory to be analysed. She knew enough to know to be afraid.  
  
She heard a faint laugh as the voice receded into the distance, leaving her to feel, once again, as alone as she ever had. 'Call him Legion,' it told her.  
  
'Dramatic much?' she laughed, though her humour was forced.  
  
Turning back, nearing her destination, she realised that he had recognised the reference, though she was no Bible scholar. Legion, she mused as she turned down yet another alley towards the large house that, the terrified minion had screamed to her while his fellows looked on with equal terror and even less inclination to resist, was the name of the demon cast out by Christ. She knew something about demon possession, had learned much while on the road, and knew enough to know that there was little of which to be frightened - a demon spirit in a human body could not enhance its strength. But the voice … the voice was eerie. She knew it, somehow, she had heard it before.  
  
Come to me, my love. She remembered that, also, a brief, titillating invitation, a large, empty room, sparsely furnished. But she knew that she had never heard those words, and she nothing of the room that she could see in her mind.  
  
She stopped before the entrance to the house. Staring at the iron gates, tipped with sharp spikes like a palisade in front of a fortress, she could barely make out the outline of the forbidding building within. She could see that it was big, though, and old-fashioned. Pre-Revolution, she thought to herself, having taken care to familiarise herself with the history of the city before she had arrived. Vampires, she knew carried their history with them, and could often be tripped up by intimate knowledge of the eras through which they had lived. She had known nothing of this in Sunnydale – Giles never had enough confidence in her abilities as student to allow her to study, she remembered bitterly. She still loved the man like a father, but he had been insufferably arrogant in his attitude.  
  
She placed her gloved hands on the gates, feeling the steel, as of the sensation would somehow tell her of what was within.  
  
'You're losing it, Buffy,' she told herself, thinking back to the almost ghostly warning that she had received. 'Betcha there never was a voice.'  
  
She should call Dawn and the others, she knew. It had been two weeks since she had last spoken to them, she thought as she stared through the railings to the courtyards beyond, obscured by clouds of snow that swirled through the icy air. Reluctant to go in, her heart hammering within her chest at the thought of the end of her search, she thought back to her family.  
  
Dawn, though she bitterly protested otherwise, was happier with Willow and Tara than she ever had been with Buffy. They had grown apart since the death of their mother, the only tie that bound them beyond the natural bond of responsibility and duty. Too often, Dawn had seemed a duty to Buffy, and too often the younger sister had responded in like fashion. Only the events of the two months between Spike's departure and that of Buffy had brought them closer, but it had not been enough to help the Slayer resist the call of her lover. She had to find him.  
  
She had to tell him.  
  
Willow, Tara and Xander had been tearful at her leaving, but they had accepted the necessity of it. There was nothing keeping her in Sunnydale by then but memories, mostly bad ones. She had to leave to find the one creature that bound her to this world, the one reason that she still had to go on. The one thing that brought her love and hate, relief and despair, joy and sorrow, all in one uncontrollable flood of sheer emotional sensation that otherwise missed.  
  
She had to find Spike. To tell him, mainly. To not have to rely on the empty pleasure of the hunt to feel alive.  
  
  
  
'The Slayer approaches, lord,' the vampire said quietly, his yellow eyes on the camera that showed the slight girl rip apart the cast steel railings that marked the end of the private preserve of Jur'Khan Chung, Lord of the North.  
  
The vampire prince brooded on the his throne-like chair, staring at the VDU, his darker than coals, and deeper than the pit. People had lost themselves in those eyes. His frame was large, though not huge, his shoulders broad and his waist thin, his eyes slanted, his face broad and unlined. He had been turned by Julia Erenia, she who had sired the line of Aurelius, when he had been only thirty one, in his prime, glorying in the bloodlust that had overtaken him at the sacking of Kiev. She had crossed the battlefield like a ghost, unseen by most, her beauty so profound that it should have drawn the eye of every man on the field. But she had been ignored.  
  
Except by him. He had turned, his sword still in hand, his bow over his shoulder, seeing her for the first time. And he had known. Known that he would spend the next hundred years serving only her. The next two hundred as her equal. The next hundred as her lover. And the last half millennium searching the earth for her killer, the Roman whose name he still refused to allow to seep through his dark mind. He would find the back-stabbing bastard, he who had the temerity to kill his own Sire. And he would meet out such punishment as the world had forgotten. He had not forgotten. In his memory lay the details of eight hundred years of education in the lost art of torture.  
  
As he stared at the Slayer, who braved the storm, ignorant as yet of being closely watched by technology that vampires were by their nature meant to despise, he was reminded of the slim, perfect form of his Sire. They were nothing alike, physically. The Slayer was shorter, her hair golden blond were Julia Erenia's had been raven black, her chest relatively flat where Julia's had been full and inviting, her nose squat where the Roman noble's had been aquiline, typically Patrician. But the spirit was there, the same sense of endless yearning, the same grief.  
  
'She searches the face of this world for William the Bloody,' he told his men. Two of them turned, the rest had heard the story, and reacted with fury that one of the mightiest of their kind could be so corrupted. They wondered, Jur'Khan Chung could see. They asked themselves if the same contagion of conscience could infect them.  
  
'She loved him,' he continued as he watched her approach the first line, which she could not see, nor expect. He knew she would pass it. They were young minions, no match for the likes of her. 'And he her. Their love consumed them both, even to death and after, ending only in him leaving, knowing that such impure emotion would eat him alive. He sought a return to himself, burying himself in the dreary comforts of the Old World, terrified of the vibrancy of the New. But he cannot run forever. She has found him.'  
  
The two watching him carefully chanced a glance at each other. William the Bloody was not here, not in this compound, surely not in the city of St. Peter. Surely they would know, their Lord would tell them.  
  
He could see the question in their eyes as he watched the Slayer dispatch the first fledgling that crossed her path as she might swat a troublesome insect. Oh, this one had experience married to skill, he could see with the delight of anticipation. So few Slayers did, so few lived long enough to appreciate their exquisite skill, so many felt the irresistible pull of the grave beckoning them.  
  
'No,' he answered the unasked question. 'He is not here with us. But he is here, in this city. He attracts little attention, he never hunts. He wants only to left alone in his anonymity.' He sighed with pleasure as he watched the Summers girl take out another of his guards with a back spin kick and perfectly, beautifully executed follow through with the thin sliver of wood in her hand. 'But his reputation had caught up with him, as it would no matter how far he tried to run.'  
  
The first two continued to look at the monitor, glad as the snow began to abate. Their eyes were powerful, far more powerful than those of any human, but they had limits. They were as impressed as their lord with what they saw, but unlike him it was appreciation tinged with fear. Old though they were, powerful though they had proved themselves to be, they knew that they were not invincible.  
  
The second two were younger, more arrogant, not bothering to watch as the Slayer contemptuously brushed aside the challenge of the four fledglings. One was still alive, unconscious, with a twisted neck that it would not recover from for some weeks.  
  
'She has learned from her lover,' the first observed to the second as Jur'Khan Chung leaned forward imperceptibly, savouring everything he saw, his mind for once ignoring the physical feeling of pure hatred and malice that had sustained it through the long centuries in search of a creature that he had never met. 'That was not a move in which Slayers are trained. The Watchers are too orthodox in their methods. That was the move of a vampire, and a powerful one.'  
  
The other murmured his agreement as she neared the massive bolted door that swung open before her as Jur'Khan Chung depressed the button on the side of his massive chair. The second two did not know why he was allowing her to enter, but they knew that they did not like it. They moved to stop her.  
  
'Halt,' the voice of the Mongol came from the shadows into which he had, unseen, receded. 'Let her come to us. Let her be.'  
  
'But why, Lord?' the last demanded with more force than, on another day, would have been tolerated. He backed off, slightly, when he realised the degree of insolence that he had shown. Had his heart functioned, it would have been pounding with the terror that he would feel at his likely punishment, but his Master's mind was elsewhere on this long winter's night.  
  
'I can feel him,' he told them. All knew to whom he referred, the unnamed that their Master had hunted across the continents for centuries. 'And she will bring me to him.'  
  
  
  
Buff barely glanced behind her at the snow-covered grass and concrete, rapidly covering over the thin layer of dust that was all that remained of the four vampires that had attacked her. They meant nothing, and probably had meant nothing even when they had been alive. Or undead, whatever. Spike had abolished the distinction in her mind, blurred her idea of what life meant.  
  
The door in front of her was open, she saw. Massive steel, crossed with bars of solid iron, it was designed to stop anything but a direct hit from an artillery or tank shell. She would never have been able to break through it nor, in this weather and in this poor light, would she have been able to scale the sheer face of brick that confronted her. But the door invited her. Like cheese to a mouse, she thought to herself, knowing that it had to be some form of trap. But she had faced the Master, Angelus, even a God, and she was not frightened of any vampire.  
  
The voice that she had heard and the strange images in her mind that it evoked continued to trouble her as she crossed the threshold, into the darkness beyond, but she tried to ignore it, to concentrate all of her sense and faculties on what faced her, on the end to her seemingly fruitless search for the one creature in the world that had loved her without reservation or hesitation. The one whose passion matched her own, the only one who could bring that passion to the surface through the haze of deadened emotion that cut her off from life.  
  
'I need you, Spike,' she whispered to the cavernous, empty silence. She could sense something, but it was not yet near.  
  
As she walked through the chamber, it was illuminated suddenly by motion-sensor lights. She stopped to look around, though she was sure that she could have navigated the near pitch-black even without lights that merely made things easier.  
  
'Let slip the dogs of war,' she breathed as she saw the room.  
  
It was large, like a ballroom, and mostly empty, through there were some wooden stools and a plain table at the far end, beside a door that was closed. But her comment to the emptiness was caused by the décor. Paintings of all sizes, styles and eras hung from the plain stone walls, like those a medieval castle, depicting every scene from war that could be imagined. One she recognised vaguely as the Rape of the Sabines, depicting the Roman legions sacking a city. She had seen that when in college. Another was Wolfe's siege of Quebec, the first large-scale portrait of battle. She recognised none of the rest, though there must have been more than a hundred, maybe a lot more, covering the walls from top to bottom, end to end. The room was a monument to the Art of War, in the literal sense.  
  
'Impressed, Slayer?'  
  
Shocked at being so easily surprised, she turned quickly, her hand flashing to the crossbow that she carried beneath her heavy coat. The voice echoed throughout the chamber, bouncing from the paintings of organised military violence.  
  
She saw the speaker, standing on a balcony above the door that she did not notice when she had walked in. He was big, and muscular, his skin dark for a vampire and his eyes slanted and vicious, expressing unexplored depths of malice.  
  
'Jur'Khan Chung,' she breathed.  
  
She lowered her weapon as, from hidden doors to the right and left of her, four vampires surrounded her. 


	3. Chapter 3

Against her expectations of the hospitality of vampires, Buffy was not attacked or seized, but lead through the closed door at the far end of the room. The four vampires that surrounded her reeked of power over and above normal for their kind, but her predatory sense told her that she would have been able to take at least two of them before she fell. But she also knew that she had not come so far to be killed at the hands of a powerful Master who obviously had designs other than her death. Nor was she sure that, even were she able to take all four, would she be able to fight Jur'Khan Chung. He had faded into the shadows of the balcony from which he had greeted her, but she could still feel his awesome strength behind her, watching her. She had never felt so much power in a vampire, not even the Master. This one was a prince of the Undead.  
  
'You guys always dress this formal,' she asked them flippantly in Russian, 'or is it just for me?' She was actually curious. All were dressed in the same well-designed suits that the vampire she had killed in the bar, though they were not as smooth. In fact, she thought them nervous as they led her through the door.  
  
One of them turned slightly, holding the door open to allow her through. It was so incongruous she almost laughed. He made her feel as though she were less of a prisoner than an honoured guest, as though he did not know that she was simply biding her time to escape. 'Image is a tool in the hands of those who know how to use it,' he told her, his tone dry, his eyes watchful though not yet aggressive. 'Your lover knows that well.'  
  
Her face flushed, and she resisted the temptation to charge him. Instead, she channelled her anger, burying it carefully, though not forgetting it. Her voice level, she spoke. 'You know about Spike?'  
  
He shrugged. 'Our Lord will tell you what he thinks you need to know. For now, rest here and refresh yourself. He will come in an hour.' He smiled slightly, though his voice remained cold, his face impassive. 'You will not be harmed.'  
  
'Heard that one before,' she told him, though she entered the room without so much as a backwards glance, pretending for the moment to be a willing player in this little drama.  
  
The room beyond was far smaller than the gallery of war, though it was not small. At one end was a bath and shower, the curtain open. A large double bed, comfortably appointed with what looked like silk sheets, was opposite the door, a dresser with a richly decorated mirror and frame on the wall beside. The wall was plain stone, but the carpet was a deep crimson red, expensive and full. The room spoke loudly of tasteful expense.  
  
The door closed behind her, though she did not hear it locked she was sure that she could batter against it for hours without making a dent.  
  
She looked around for any sign of cameras or hidden windows, but could see none. Removing her heavy outer coat and the jacket beneath, she sat on the bed, which gave way comfortably. She sighed, not realising until now how tired she had felt, how exhausted from the tension that had suffused her since she had arrived by train in this city. She knew that Spike was here. She could not feel him as she could still feel the power of Jur'Khan Chung, but in a way that went beyond her calling and his essence. She could feel him as a wolf felt his mate.  
  
She turned on the shower and let the water run until it was not quite hot enough to scald. Removing her clothes, she stepped beneath the powerfully running water, letting it flow down her tanned skin, warming her deeply.  
  
She let her thoughts go back to the last time that she had seen Spike, bruised and bloody beneath her powerful blows in the alley behind the police station. She could have killed him then, so great was the anger that she felt. She realised soon after, minutes even, that her anger was not directed at him, but rather at herself. What they had shared, the sheer intensity of feeling that had linked her to a world that was rapidly moving out of range of her emotions, was so powerful that she had shied away from it, and when he had not been able to escape it, she had blamed him. Beaten him. Cursed and denigrated him, hoping that he would back away.  
  
He never had.  
  
'I should never have blamed you,' she whispered as she rubbed the soap into her skin, cleansing her body, but not yet touching the stain on her soul.  
  
It was hardly his fault that he had elicited such feelings in her. He had been sure of his own, as he had been sure of hers, and had only wanted her to admit to herself what he already knew, that she returned everything that he felt for her even more strongly than he, for in her there was no conflict between nature and inclination on one hand and the desires of the heart on the other. She would have told him that. It would have taken only a little more time for her to admit to herself, and later to him, what she felt.  
  
'You never gave me the chance,' she breathed. Stepping over the rim of the tub, wrapping a towel around herself and sitting on the bed, brushing her golden hair with a carved brush from the dresser.  
  
He had left that night, leaving only a note. She had gone to look for him the next evening, bringing a six-pack of beer that would serve as the first, she hoped, of many peace offerings. He deserved at the least an apology. From deeper within, she remembered as she lay on the bed in the lair of another vampire, a voice had told her that he had deserved more. He had deserved honesty from the woman that he loved.  
  
The crypt was the same, but he had not been there. She had sensed that as soon as the door had opened without being locked from the inside. On the TV, a small envelope had been left. She had out the beer down, her hands trembling, and picked up the note.  
  
Slayer,  
  
I love you too much to see you suffer, and not enough to know how to stop it. You would have been better off if you had killed me yesterday. So would I. Tell Dawn that I'm sorry.  
  
Goodbye, Buffy.  
  
She closed her eyes as she dressed, slowly and mechanically. After five months searching, and even after the trauma of the events during the two months after he left and she was still in Sunnydale, the pain and the betrayal, that letter still made her ache for his touch.  
  
'Love isn't brains,' she whispered to herself, staring into the mirror, seeing a pale imitation of herself. She remembered the words, and her mood darkened further as she remembered the context. Angel.  
  
SIX MONTHS EARLIER  
  
'How could you let him touch you, Buffy?' Angel demanded, without anger, simple astonishment in his voice. Connor was in the crib behind him, beside the couch in the front room, gurgling softly, unaware of the tension in the room. She stole a glance at the baby, trying to keep the longing from her face as she tried even harder to make Angel understand, while at the back of her mind a treacherous voice asked her why she cared whether or not that he did.  
  
Behind him stood Wesley and Cordelia, their faces stern and unbending as Angel's. Wesley's was haunted, Cordelia's possessive and protective, but both bore the stamp of unthinking condemnation.  
  
Behind her stood Xander and Willow, with Dawn off to one side. Her against him, his against hers, if it came to that. What did he know, after all? Where had he been for the last three years?  
  
'He loved me … loves me,' she told him, keeping her voice level despite the temptation to lash out.  
  
'He loves suffering and pain,' Angel told her. 'Torture and death. The last woman that he loved was the scourge of continents. What lies did he tell you to convince you that he loved you?'  
  
'Have you changed that much that you believe the word of vampires?' Wesley asked her, though his voice carried less conviction. He sounded weary. 'Your job is to kill them before you get to know them.'  
  
'She knows what her job is, Brit boy,' Xander snarled. Xander, of all people, defending Buffy's choices. Now that Spike was gone, he could say what he wanted without fear of losing face. That, she was convinced, was all that he had feared. Such a childish motive for pettiness. 'What's your job again? Oh, yeah, that's right. You work for one of the most evil vampires ever. You can talk.'  
  
'Angel isn't evil,' Cordelia told him, moving up to stand beside the vampire.  
  
'Neither is Spike, not any more,' Buffy told her. 'You weren't here, you didn't see. You can't know.'  
  
Angel growled. 'I came here because I knew you would be in pain, because I know what its like, now that I have a son, to lose what you lost.' He stepped forward, looming over her as he had so many times before. To this day, she could not remember what the sixteen year old girl she had been had ever seen in him. 'I never thought that Spike would be the cause of it. Or that you allowed him to be. That you let yourself be sullied.'  
  
The slap that she delivered to his square chin echoed through the house. All was silence, though none were shocked.  
  
'Get out,' she ordered him coldly, knowing that there was nothing more to say, nothing more that could be said. She was nothing like the girl that he remembered, had none of the old illusions left. All had crumbled before the contradictions with which she had been presented by Spike.  
  
But she could barely accept that she had only been forced to realise it after he had left. After he had left that heart-rending note. After she had left him with no choice through her own wilful ignorance and blind fear.  
  
Angel gathered up Connor, and turned to leave. Before he stepped through the door, knowing that one chapter in his long life would close with door, he turned slightly.  
  
'If he loved you that much, he wouldn't have left.'  
  
The sheer hypocrisy of the sentiment staggered her, though beneath it lay a deeper truth that she had known for years, buried deep beneath the pleasant memories to which she had clung but which now were ripped away by his blind righteousness.  
  
'If it wasn't for what you did to me, I would never have forced him to leave.'  
  
Those, she knew, were the last words that they would ever exchange. She had, after years of pointless comparison, laid to rest the ghosts of Angel's flawed perfection.  
  
A knock at the door brought her back from her reverie, and she rose. 'Come in.'  
  
One of the vampires that had brought her stepped through the threshold. 'Lord Chung wishes to speak with you.'  
  
Candles burned dimly around the room, flickering, casting strange shadows across the books that lined the study from floor to ceiling. One wall alone was clear of literature, and it was covered with screens, with a panel at the front. There were twelve in all, and a larger one in the centre. All showed views of what she assumed was the house and the grounds around. Buffy was not surprised that the centre screen showed the courtyard at the front, through which she had fought to get here. Like Spike, Jur'Khan Chung was careful enough to watch his opponents before he fought.  
  
She wasn't quite sure how she knew, instinct maybe, but she didn't think that he had asked her here to fight. He sat on a large chair, raised slightly on a low dais, like a throne, though it was plain wood. The had barely seen him when she had entered the chamber at the front of the house, so she took a moment to study him.  
  
He had been a large man when alive, and vampirism had done nothing to diminish him. Like the others, he wore a plain, though expensive suit, though his was of pure black, with a crimson red tie over a pristine white shirt. His bulk showed through, and there was no questioning his physical strength. His face was impassive as he watched her enter, the one who brought her retreating quietly through the door and closing it quietly. The only noise came from the fire in the corner behind the vampire lord.  
  
His voice was deep and guttural as he rose from the chair slowly, every movement controlled. He was oriental in origin, though his face was paler than any alive. His eyes were almost black, his hair tied back in a ponytail that ran past his shoulders.  
  
'Drink?' he asked her, for all the world like a gracious host with an honoured guest, not a vampire speaking with a Slayer.  
  
She hesitated. 'No,' she said shortly. She needed her head clear if she was to elicit any information about where Spike was. And if she needed to fight, for he was no mean adversary, if it was to come to that.  
  
He gestured idly. 'Sit, woman,' he ordered. 'I am no barbarian.'  
  
She bristled at his tone, but followed his instructions, though she reversed the wooden chair, sitting facing the back rather than in the normal manner. She wanted to be able to rise quickly, if need be. His attitude did nothing to relieve her tension, and the gloomy décor merely added to it. She could feel her heart thumping, for she knew that she was nearing the end of her search.  
  
'You know why I'm here, right?' she asked, still speaking in Russian. 'You know why I came here?'  
  
'To find William the Bloody,' he replied, pouring himself what looked like a straight vodka in a shot glass which he knocked back, Russian-style, with a brief grimace. He raised the glass to her in a salute. 'Za zdorovya.' At her blank look, he smiled slightly, though it never reached his eyes. 'Its an old Russian toast.' He moved over to the fire, staring into the flames.  
  
She lost patience, the tension becoming too great. 'Do you know where is? Why am I wasting my time?'  
  
'As you get older, Buffy Summers, you'll realise that time is all that most of us have, and that it is filled with nothing but unpleasant memories.' He turned back, pointing to the small table with the bottle. 'Pour yourself a drink, and me another. We'll both need them before this is over.'  
  
She followed his instruction, passing him another shot. She diluted hers with water from a decanter, and sipped it. It was fiery, nothing like the mediocre vodka back home. Pepper vodka, she remembered. One of the rarest kinds – she had first drank it in Paris, after taking out a coven of vampires with the aid of a Special Forces unit of the French Army. She carried the medal that she had received for her work somewhere in her threadbare bags, back at the small hotel.  
  
After a moment, he turned to her. 'You were right,' he told her quietly as the fire burned behind him, giving him a hellish glow along his right side. 'I do know where William the Bloody, or Spike as he has become known, is. He is three miles from here, in a small house that was once owned by the Archduke Nikolai, of the House of Romanov. He's related to them, did you know that?'  
  
Buffy was unable to keep the astonishment that she felt at learning that Spike was related to the vanished family of the last Russia Tsars from her face. He saw it, and smiled again. 'I suppose he doesn't care much anymore. My being related to the house of the Great Khan himself means nothing to me, after all.'  
  
'Where is this house?' she asked, stepping forward slightly so that she could feel the heat coming from the blazing wood fire. 'Where is he? And why have you brought me here to tell me? You want something from me, or you would have just killed me and have done with it.'  
  
He looked at her, his eyes suddenly blazing. For the first time, she noticed the pure hatred that festered beneath those black orbs, and she shrank away from it. She had seen hate, she had felt it and had acted on it, but she had never imagined that any creature could hold as much as him. She was surprised that it had not yet consumed him. She stepped carefully back, to give herself room in case he tried anything.  
  
'You are right, of course,' he told her, though his voice was immeasurably colder. 'I need something from you. From you and your lover both, actually.' He stepped away from the fire and walked to the far side of the room, to a small locker in the opposite corner. She followed him carefully with her eyes.  
  
He opened the drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. Striding back across the room, he passed it to her, them reached over her. She pulled away quickly, but he was merely reaching for the bottle, which he used to fill another glass. She had forgotten about the one in her hand, which she sipped again. It warmed her as it went down, and she closed her eyes briefly at the pleasant sensation.  
  
The paper that he passed her was a photo, she saw as put the drink back on the table.  
  
'Have you ever seen this man?' he asked her.  
  
The picture was not of the best quality, but it was enough. The man was young enough, maybe a few years older than she. His hair was black, and short, his face clean-shaven. The picture looked to have been taken in an airport or a bus station, and he was looking away, but she could see enough to see that he was extraordinarily handsome, albeit cold. His face betrayed no emotion at all, like a classical statue. For some reason, he was familiar, though she was sure that she had never seen him before.  
  
'No,' she told Jur'Khan Chung, impatient for information about Spike but knowing that, aside from the small matter of leaving the house alive, she needed his co-operation in her search. 'Who is he?'  
  
'He who will not be named,' he breathed, staring with undisguised malevolence at the picture. 'This was the last time that anyone saw him, as far as I know. And I have earched. I have had people searching for this creature for three centuries, across all continents and nations. And all I have is this photo.' He growled.  
  
She pulled back as his face shifted, becoming even more cruel, but he soon shifted back .'Who is he?' she asked again.  
  
'Some call him Legion.'  
  
It hit her like a physical blow, the images in her mind so powerful that she fell back against wall, barely stopping herself from sliding to the floor.  
  
She did not see Jur'Khan Chung watch her analytically, like a scientist would a lab rat, with a slight smile on his cold face that this time did reach his eyes.  
  
She could see things in her mind, things that she was sure that she had never seen before in real life. Images of buildings the likes of which had not been seen on earth in centuries. Images of soldiers with helmets with red plumes, light iron armour, segmented not plate, wearing greaves and carrying shortswords. No, gladius. She knew nothing of how she knew that, or how she knew that the long javelins that they carried were called pilums.  
  
It was in the middle of a sun bleached valley, the grass a brilliant green, white topped mountains barely visible in the distance. There was a road of cobbled stone passing directly through, relieved only by a large stone building.  
  
They stood in perfect formation, metal gleaming with the light of the sun, maybe two hundred before a large stone building with arches and carved columns. The columns had exquisite reliefs of every martial scene imaginable, carved in a white stone that reflected the daylight brilliantly. The light fell on the armour of the soldiers, all of whom stood perfectly still, like statues. Hard faced men, their eyes narrowed, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing and everything. Tanned and leathered, they were clean shaven. They stood proudly, their bearings erect as they held themselves. These were men who believed in themselves and, more, in each other. Legio XVI.  
  
Nor did she recognise the man that rode a black horse in front of them. Unlike them, he wore a golden, gilded breastplate, and his head was bare. His hair was jet black, and close cut, his face handsome but cold. He rode his horse arrogantly, and he wore his armour and sword with the ease of long practice. He was not old, maybe twenty five, but the reverence in which he was held by those behind him was palpable. He could lead them to storm the gates of hell, and they would follow.  
  
'Legion, she gasped, coming back to the present with a grunt, her head splitting. She opened her eyes, remembering only after a moment where she was, and with whom.  
  
Levering herself away from the wall, she pushed herself upright and turned to face the powerful vampire who was watching her carefully. 'What did you do to me?' she demanded furiously, withdrawing a stake from her pocket.  
  
'Nothing,' he answered, unmoved. His eye flickered to the wood in her hand, and then back to her face. 'And I would appreciate you listening. If you don't, even if you make it past me, you won't leave this house alive. And your Spike will not survive the next week. Though I suppose you could be with him in heaven.' His lip curled with some disgust at the thought.  
  
'Talk,' she ordered him, running rapidly out of patience. She could almost taste Spike, she knew that he was that close. Then she could see him. More, then she could tell him.  
  
Jur'Khan Chung sighed and, seeing that she would not relinquish the stake, moved to the opposite side of the room. 'What did you mean that Spike will not live for a week?'  
  
'The picture you have in your hand is of a creature that killed the only thing that I ever loved,' he told her. He might as well have been reciting the weather for all the feeling that was in his voice. 'In the year 1643, at Rocroi.' Seeing her blank face, he elaborated. 'It was a battle towards the end of the Thirty Years War, a war between Catholics and Protestants for domination of Europe. More or less. Rocroi was where I was supposed to meet her – we had not seen each other for more than fifty years. The battle was just a coincidence.'  
  
'And?'  
  
He stared at the fire, his face grim as he remembered the pain. 'He was there, the vampire in the picture. He killed her when he found her, I never knew why. She had been my Sire, and I loved her as only a Childe can love his Sire. She was his too, I think, though she never said. When he killed her, he left. I have not stopped hunting him since. I won't until I can catch him and make his suffering last the same length of time that I have been searching.'  
  
'And this has what to do with me?' she asked, against her better judgement sensing that what he told her was true. She could recognise the shattered dream that was lost love when she saw it. In her short life, she had seen it too much. For the last seven months, she saw it whenever she looked in the mirror.  
  
'This creature, Legion – that is not his real name, by the way, I never speak his name – is also hunting. He disregards me as a threat, thinking that I am not powerful enough to trouble him. He might well be right. But I have spent too long in the chase not to get to know his every habit and every move. I will be ready, he will merely be arrogant. And he will fall because of it. But, I digress.  
  
'He is here, in the this city. He, too, had found his prey. You see, child, we three are linked. We have all traced our prey to St. Petersburg. And we will all see the end of our search, one way or another, quite soon. You are hunting Spike, to tell him you love him or some such nonsense. You are too young to know what love is.'  
  
He walked across the room, to stand directly in front of her, his black eyes boring into hers, pinning her against the wall. She was helpless to move beneath the power of those eyes. At that moment, a voice told her at the back of her mind, he would have been able to tear the head from her shoulders, and she would not have been able to stop him, so efficiently had he buried her will beneath his own. The light from the candles around the room danced around his hard face, full of suppressed fury as it was. The flickering embers of the dying fire reflected in his eyes.  
  
He was barely inches from her as he spoke, his voice soft and quiet, tortured and furious. He rested against the wall, looming over her, one hand against the cold stone behind her, over her narrow shoulder, small as she was beside his bulk. Power was irrelevant in that moment, for at that moment he was the predator, she the helpless prey.  
  
Yet all he did was speak. 'What makes you think that you can return his love, child?' he asked, his words a dagger to her soul. Even before he elaborated, she knew what he would say. 'He is more than a century old, and in that time has lived ten lifetimes, building a passion that you could begin to touch. He loves you with everything that he is, everything that he has become over that century. Think of what he has seen, what he has done to make him what he is, to make him what you think you love. What is your love to him? You will never be able to return what he feels for you – you would never be capable of feeling that depth of emotion.'  
  
He turned away. All she could feel was the heaviness in her heart as what he said slowly, so slowly, sank in. 'You could love him with every fibre of your essence,' he told her relentlessly. 'And still you could return barely a tenth of what he feels for you.' He chuckled, without humour.  
  
'I have to tell him,' she said, her voice barely audible, her tone small, like that a of child before his age and perverted wisdom. 'Tell him what happened after he left, tell him that I –' She stopped, shaking herself. 'I have to find him.'  
  
'Of course you do,' he told her, not looking at her. 'But for that you have to find him. For that you need me. And then, Slayer, I need you.'  
  
She shook herself slightly, though the truth of his words still stung. How could ever return Spike's love? How could she return the feelings of a … man … who loved so deeply that he had loved the same woman faithfully for more than a century. 'What do you need me for?'  
  
'While you hunt,' he told her, 'so do I. And while I hunt, so does Legion.'  
  
She took a deep drink to calm herself, though she knew that she still needed a clear head, now more than ever perhaps. 'What is he hunting? And what does it have to do with me?'  
  
The fire gave up its struggle, and died. The room became slightly, the shadows changing. She pulled her coat more tightly around her – it shouldn't have been any colder, but it was. She was cold within, as well as without.  
  
'Legion want's revenge, as do I.'  
  
'Revenge for what? And again, what does this have to do with me?'  
  
He turned, though now he was deep in the shadows, only his face visible, and that barely. 'If you leave this city now, nothing at all. He knows that you are here, as you can sense him. For some reason that I have yet to understand, you are linked to him. I suspect that you have been able to feel him for your whole life.'  
  
She shook her head vigorously. 'This, this thing in my head, the images,' she momentarily forgot that she had not told him of them, but he nodded his head – he knew anyway, somehow, 'they only started when I got here.'  
  
'Perhaps,' he murmured, moving out from the shadows into the dim candlelight. 'Perhaps not. In any case, you are not why he is here. He's here for someone else.'  
  
'Who?'  
  
'He is looking for revenge for something done to him during the last war, done to him by a woman that your Spike will fight to the death to protect.'  
  
Buffy knew the name before she heard it – she could see her face as clearly as the last images.  
  
As they rose in her mind, the last shred of hope that she felt vanished like mist in the wind.  
  
'Drusilla.' 


	4. Chapter 4

The baby, barely three months old and starving, cried desperately for its mother, for anyone who would feed it and nurture it. It lay in tattered rags at the side of the alley, abandoned by the woman who had three other mouths to feed and no money with which to do it. She had cried, she had agonised, but in the end she knew that she had no choice. The children that she had left at home, in the shack that kept out nothing of the harsh Russian winter in which they huddled in ancient, cast-off clothes around a small fire that provided so little warmth against the bitter cold, needed her more than did this child. Her husband was dead, killed in a fight for some money that was not his. She had left the baby, hoping against hope that someone would look after it, knowing better. He was one among hundreds in this decaying wreck of a city.  
  
She was wrong. The screams were barely loud enough to be heard over the wind, and then only for brief moments. There were some creatures, however, that prowled the streets that listened for precisely that, the sound of despair. Easier and safer to feed from the wretched and starving of the earth.  
  
Pity that they tasted so bad, but the one that approached the starving infant that quieted with instinctive, animal, fear, cared nothing about taste.  
  
'Come to mummy,' the vampire crooned softly. They should have been words of comfort, words of safety, but from that mouth they were a death warrant, said countless times before over a hundred and fifty years. Few who heard them had lived. And those that had had wished themselves dead.  
  
'You're all cold and hungry,' the creature said as she knelt and picked up the child. She was dressed in a plain gown, totally inappropriate for the weather, but this one cared little about the cold. Sometimes, others had thought over the years, she barely noticed the world around her. 'But you're warm and happy inside, aren't you, my little puppy.' Her eyes, which had been bright with malice over a smile that was the essence of unthinking evil, clouded, the smile turning to a pout. 'But you aren't my puppy,' she chastised the now-silent child, which was staring at her with wide eyes. It was far too young to understand the danger in which it was in, for the alley was dark and quiet, so secluded that the weather barely penetrated. There was no one to hear it scream, no one to alter its fate. All it could see were the eyes of the one that held it. The eyes that sent so many to hell and beyond.  
  
'My puppy went and died on me,' she said to it, gently pulling the soiled swaddling cloth from its face, chubby despite its gnawing hunger. 'Will you go and die on me, little one?' The baby saw that alabaster face change, and suddenly, like the thunder of a gunshot in the silence, it began to scream. 'Will you die on me, or protect me from what's behind? Do you know that something is following me, that they've forced me to choose between two halves of the past? Do you?'  
  
With terrifying force, Drusilla turned and smashed the baby against the wall, ending its crying and its suffering forever. In the recesses of her mind, in the last part of her consciousness that retained some element of the sanity that had been twisted by the expert ministrations of her Daddy, she considered that the child was better off dead, better than being raised by her. A part of her always regretted what she had become. But it was a part easily quieted.  
  
'The Roman thinks that he can take me back to where I was,' she told the smear of gore on the wall, to which snow clung like droplets. 'He thinks that his revenge will be all that he needs to stand once again at the head of his legions. He doesn't know about my pretty boy.'  
  
Emerging from the shadows, where he had watched with amusement at the near mindless sadism of the insane woman, the Gentleman saw her leave the scene of carnage by which the most hardened SS veteran would have been revolted. He remembered traveling with a company of Waffen SS in the last Great War, the Liebstandarte he thought it was – yes, with Sepp Dietrich as the commanding officer. He remembered the crimes that they had committed in the name of their Fuhrer, the atrocities and the genocide. He had soon left, revolted by what he saw. He was a vampire, a Master, a craftsman of his dark arts. He had centuries of training and experience – they had had only a mindless obedience that he found sickening. He had left for America that year, 1943, braving the U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and the Council. He had sworn that he would never again return to the Old World, the scene of his greatest crimes, his most deep felt passions, and his most heartfelt rage.  
  
It had taken this lunatic to evoke again the memories that he carried with him, and for that alone he would make her pay. Her and anyone who stood for her.  
  
  
  
Buffy splashed water on her face in the filthy bathroom in her tiny hotel room. Her eyes closed, she concentrated on the feel of the icy liquid against her skin, letting it run down her neck as she sighed. She opened her eyes slowly, staring at the mirror at the alien reflection that faced her. A vain child, she remembered spending hours before the mirror, brushing her hair, doing her make-up, applying her lipstick. It seemed like at eternity ago now, a different lifetime. Someone else's life, not hers. The woman that stared back from the chipped, dirty mirror hanging badly on the tattered wallpaper that reeked of damp, was no longer her. Her skin was dry, her cheeks sunk with fatigue and stress. Her eyes were lifeless, framed by black and purple. Her lips were pale, her hair straggly and damp. Her clothes were tattered and used, barely changed for the last five months. She could not remember the last time that she had even cared. Maybe when that bouncer looked askance at her clothing in Paris, saying that she was not well enough dressed to enter the club. She had quickly convinced him otherwise, but had bought fresh clothes the next day. That, she was certain, was the last time that she had entered a clothes shop. Her underwear, bra and panties, were soiled and dirty, her socks holed, her shoes thin.  
  
All in search of a man whom she believed to be the partner of her soul, and whom she know knew to be back in the company of the woman who had held his heart for more than a century.  
  
Tattered and threadbare, lifeless and cynical like she never had been before, how could she compete with Spike's Dark Queen? How could she appear to him to be more worthy of his love than the awesome majesty of Drusilla?  
  
A tear fell from her eye, and she brushed it away defiantly. It was enough that she found him, and told him. Told him what his leaving had meant, to where it had led her, what he had left behind, and the consequences. Let that be enough, Buffy, she told herself. She had learned so much in the last five months, about herself and the world, about the darkness that lay in the human soul, enough to eclipse tenfold the most dangerous malice of any demon. She had learned more about herself than she ever could have on fifty vision quests. She was comfortable with the darkness that lurked at the edge of her will, embraced it, used it.  
  
But she was not whole, and would not be until Spike lay once again beside her. That she had learned in Sunnydale.  
  
  
  
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER.  
  
'Spike?' Xander shouted fiercely, Anya at his side, her head cocked to the side as she struggled to understand both Buffy's decision and her boyfriend's reaction to it.  
  
'Yes, Xander, Spike,' Buffy answered wearily, rubbing her stomach. It was dark as they stood on the porch. They were all there, Buffy and Dawn, Willow and Tara, Xander and Anya. Only Spike was absent, and she could feel that more than she could feel them.  
  
'But, damn it Buffy, he's nothing but a killer!' he almost screamed at her. He ignored the gentle slap to the head delivered to him by Tara, he was too far gone with fury. He stood on the bottom of the steps, looking up at her as she stood tiredly against the doorframe, the white moonlight reflecting from the wet grass below. It was raining, rare for Sunnydale, but appropriate to this most dreaded of occasions. 'You said it yourself, you told me that you called him a serial killer in prison. What if he broke out, Buffy? What if the first thing that he did was to come after people who pissed him off the last couple of years?'  
  
'Worried, Xander?' Dawn asked snidely, sitting with her legs crossed at Buffy's feet. 'You'd be the first one to die. Some of us wouldn't have to worry.'  
  
Xander looked at her bitterly. He knew that Spike could be charming when he put his mind to it, but he had never expected that that charm would work on his little Dawnie. Though he could barely understand how Willow and Tara were fine with this. Was he the only one who could see a truly obvious parallel with what had happened before?  
  
'Spike wouldn't kill anyone here,' Willow told them, her voice firm, her head thrown back with a confidence that she genuinely felt. She didn't like Spike, but it was a personal matter, not about Buffy. She looked up at the bright moon in the clear black sky above, seeing the gentle wind ruffle the leaves on the tree in the garden, a tree that both Spike and Angel had spent endless nights in protective vigil.  
  
'I thought that you didn't like Spike,' Anya said quietly. She was least comfortable at night, the heavy darkness reminding her of her past.  
  
'I don't,' Willow answered shortly. 'Its hard to like someone who twice singled you out as the weakest link in the chain. But I know that he's changed. I know that he values Buffy more that any cheap thrill that he might get from killing one of us.'  
  
Strangely, a wolf howled in the distance. Buffy shivered, holding herself closely to stay warm, though the night was not cold. She glanced around, feeling only tension. Damn them for putting her in this position of having to defend something that she had only lost because she had listened to their irrational prejudice in the first place. It truly was an irony.  
  
'If he values her so much, why did he leave?' Xander asked, one step from explosion, so hard was he trying to keep his temper.  
  
'Because I forced him to,' Buffy whispered, more to herself as she looked down at the ground, unwilling to face them. 'We all forced him to.'  
  
  
  
'Would you kill for him, Slayer?' she asked the reflection in the mirror. It was more likely to answer positively than the girl that would have stared back at her months before. 'Humans? Demons? Where will you stop?'  
  
The small bulb hanging limply from the ceiling above the tarnished mirror flickered once, twice, then slowly died, plunging the tiny, cramped bathroom into unrelieved darkness.  
  
She left the hotel, marching confidently past the front desk where an unshaven fat man in a string vest sporting a variety of crude tattoos leered at her, stopping when she looked at him and hurriedly putting his head back to whatever her had been reading.  
  
She could barely believe that she had spent the whole of the previous day in that tiny room for which she was paying an exorbitant price. So quickly had the time gone that she had barely realised that what passed for the sun in this, the darkest of nations, had risen and fallen in the time that she had spent in continuous introspection.  
  
The early evening air was chill, though the snow had abated. The hostel in which she was staying was located at the corner of a long street, dominated by high buildings that hemmed her in on all sides. There had been no thaw over the previous day, and the streets were a dark grey carpet of dirty snow, illuminated occasionally by the flickering of red neon signs that announced, in Russian, every pleasure for which money could pay. Occasionally, cars with chained tires would drive carefully up and down the streets, their windows darkened, barely the outline of those within visible as they huddled over the wheel, hoping that through the darkness they would be able to see whatever was rushing forward.  
  
As she left the dingy building, she was surrounded by the usual hoard of beggars, wailing with practised ease about their starving children and crippled husbands. Her face impassive, she ignored them all, pausing once to punch one in the face who became too aggressive. The others backed off as they saw the woman fly back fully ten feet, making a trail in the snow, blood pouring from her crushed nose. She twitched once, and was still. The silence that fell was deafening. She walked on as it began to drizzle.  
  
The address that she had been given by the vampire lord Jur'Khan Chung was barely five minutes from her hotel, if it was correct. The line of black and white between vampires and human having been blurred by experience, she trusted him more than she ever would have before, for she believed what she was told about a commonality of interest between them. Certainly, she could think of no other motive that a powerful creature such as he would have in telling her where Spike was.  
  
The images in her mind continued to flash like flickering light at the edge of her vision.  
  
She could see the soldiers in their segmented armour, holding their javelins, their shortswords sheathed as they stared out at the grim forest beyond a clearing. They stood in perfect order, their armour gleaming in the cold sun as their breath was visible in front of their faces. Behind them was the panoply of Roman war – catapults, ballistae, archers and siege engineers, though this, she knew as she stood in the line – what? – that there was no one here to besiege. The Senate had decreed the protection of the northern frontier of Italia beyond Transalpine Gaul, and for that the savage tribes of the Helvetii had to be crushed by the might of Rome. Fully five legions had been sent to deal with the barbarian threat, and now they endured the one permanent feature of warfare throughout the ages. – the wait before the battle. They were long service veterans, all of them, some but a year from retirement to a life of rural simplicity, but until then, they would fight. For their standards, for their units, for Rome.  
  
And for their general, who rode at the front, his gaze never wavering from the forest ahead. He knew from where the threat would come, how to deal with it, how to crush it. In him, they placed the confidence gained from years of near-continuous victory. In him resided the hopes of Rome.  
  
And the fears of the Senate.  
  
Buffy shook herself as she trudged down the road, past people who struggled against the wind in their heavy coats and fur hats, their thick boots insulating them from the cold. She knew nothing of where the Gladiator images were coming, but she knew them to be some form of link with the vampire that Jur'Khan Chung would refer only through teeth clenched with hatred as 'Legion.'  
  
'Ready for him, yet, child?' came that same ghostly voice that she had heard yesterday evening. She stopped, and listened, barely noticing that the narrow street, dirty and foul smelling with the refuse of the local tenements, was empty of people.  
  
She looked around, cursing herself silently for not paying more attention. Had she not been distracted, she would have noticed that she was being watched.  
  
'Who the hell are you?' she shouted at the oppressive emptiness.  
  
She heard only a chuckle. 'More than you wish to know, girl,' came the answer in that same detached.  
  
'I've heard that kind of thing before,' she shouted, turning slowly in the empty, snow covered road. 'I've buried things that said that to me before.'  
  
'You've never come up against the likes of what you face soon, Slayer,' it replied. The wind was the only other noise that could be heard, whistling through the broken windows of the empty buildings surrounding her as the darkness grew heavier, the sun finally sinking below the horizon. The voice surrounded her, as though it was coming from everywhere at once. 'You're lover will not help you.'  
  
The sense of being watched vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving with it only a sense of chill, a sense of dread that she did not remember feeling before. The Master had come, and died. Angelus and the Mayor had been destroyed. Adam was killed, Glory defeated. Though the cost rose with each encounter, she had learned to live with the expectation of defeat counter-balancing the hope of victory. This was different. Then she had known what she faced.  
  
As she stood in the empty street, the tallness of the old Tsarist buildings looming over her, concealing everything and showing nothing, the wind whistling through their vast emptiness, she shivered again. Behind her were her friends, who only barely understood what she was searching for, for what she had left her home. Behind her also the legacy of unbroken victory, but also a vampire lord who seemed to share some of her interests. The snow kicked up her beneath her feet as she wondered at the nature of what lay within a ten minute walk, the wind blowing it in a small could around her feet.  
  
To meet Spike, yes, but also his old lover. And, of Jur'Khan Chung's oldest enemy, killer of his sire, the vampire she knew only as 'Legion,' to whom she was somehow linked. It was enough to freeze her soul.  
  
Her soul. That was the biggest factor in her bitterness, of the fear that had driven Spike from home and sent her after him. What was a soul? How was she sure that she had one, or that any human was somehow fundamentally different from the soul of a vampire. Vampire's needed blood to live, and humans were the readiest meal. The evil in their unbeating hearts was impossible to deny, but equally impossible was the depth of emotion of which they were capable of feeling.  
  
A car sped past her, its chained tires ripping up the ill-maintained road as it drove. She felt the slight blow of the wind as she trudged through the snow.  
  
'You can't love without a soul,' she remembered telling Spike once. And, of all people, it had been Drusilla who had corrected her. 'Oh, we can, you know. We can love quite well. If not wisely.'  
  
So could she. She could love quite well, but seldom wisely. Angel, the product of a teenage crush, the typical desire for an older man. Parker had been nothing more than a mistake. Riley, a sweet child, utterly incapable of understanding with any depth both the strength that she wielded like the guns that defended him and the darkness in her soul.  
  
Spike. The one man that she knew who had understood every part of her, the hesitant girl within who struggled to break the chains that bound the Slayer. The vicious warrior, killing everything that crossed her path. And the Slayer, the sacred duty that bound her by birthright.  
  
She stopped before the door whose address that she had been given by Jur'Khan Chung. She did not know if he was following her, he had merely told her that it would serve his ends for her to find Spike, and that if she did Legion would not be long behind in search of his revenge for some wrong that even the vampire lord knew nothing of. When he did, she and Jur'Khan Chung would let him have Drusilla, and then the three of them would deal with Legion. Buffy, because it was her duty. Spike, for revenge for Drusilla. And Jur'Khan Chung for his own reasons.  
  
The door was solid wood, though badly varnished and poorly maintained. The house itself looked deserted, a small hovel between two larger townhouses whose windows were heavily barred. The windows of this house were boarded up, hurriedly she thought as she looked over the poorly finished stone, chipped with poorly written anti-government graffiti in Russian that reflected grey in the clear moonlight and chill air.  
  
She took a deep breath, then stopped, the incongruity of it striking her as pathetically amusing. It had always irritated Spike when she had barged straight into his crypt without any of the niceties that he observed whenever entering her home.  
  
Something was in there, probably a vampire or maybe more than one. She could feel that much with her unnatural instincts. She could not tell if it was Spike.  
  
She was about to knock, but stopped, leaning heavily against the door with a faint sigh as another wave of images came over her.  
  
He/she was standing in a long, well-tended garden with an ornate sculpted fountain of a winged angel spouting water from its mouth. The sun was bright overhead, illuminating the green grass and tastefully arranged roses that cascaded down a stone wall to his left. It was early evening, she/he saw, the sun about to fall gently below the famous Seven Hills. He sighed softly, looking down at his uniform, polished iron armour and plain belt. He was not armed, though he wihed that he was. He was uncomfortable in the heat of Rome, preferring the cold nights of the camp.  
  
Though the villa behind was plush and well-appointed, clean marble colonnades and clear glass, silk rugs covering the floors and tended by an army of servants as befitted one of the most senior Patrician families, he hated the city. His wife bored him, the marriage arranged. The slave girls did nothing, the chattering of the servants irritated him. The political ferment was alien to his straightforward calculation, the strategic risks never seeming worth the gain.  
  
'Are you not retiring for the evening, my lord?' he heard the melodious voice from behind him. He cursed under his breath, turning, his armour clanking.  
  
His wife (why did that seem wrong?) was short, though exquisitely well- formed, a virgin on their wedding night. Her face was dark from the sun, for she enjoyed spending hers days in the vineyards of the south. Her features were chiselled, perfectly aquiline, the ideal of a Patrician wife, pure blood of Rome. She showed it in her stance as she stood beneath the carved columns of the house, her stance arrogant, her head thrown back with a challenge.  
  
He sighed once again, though less in weariness than anger, well-controlled as he watched the sun finally disappear, leaving only the exquisite reed sky of early evening, lending the trees an eerie glow on their green leaves, perfectly still in air that existed without the slightest whisper of a breeze.  
  
'Not tonight, wife,' he told the woman, who nodded once, and swept back inside. They had not made love for the better part of six months and, truth to tell, he did not miss it. Sex was irrelevant next to the pure, savage joy of battle.  
  
He stood for what might have been hours, staring out at the city below without so much as a flicker of expression, his face perfectly impassive, his hands clasped rigidly behind his back as night fell slowly. The torches were lit by the unobtrusive servants, who knew better than to interrupt. The light from the flames and the smell of the tar changed the mood of the garden, creating distorted shadows where none had existed before, the leaves of the trees becoming gargoyles on the wall, the petals of the flowers becoming monsters of classical legend as the sputtered on the cobbled ground. The air became gradually colder, enjoyably so. The Senate, he knew, was meeting tomorrow, and he was compelled to attend. They feared his ambition, he knew. He smiled for the first time that night, a smile of pure malevolence. Let them fear me, he thought.  
  
'That is not the smile of the benevolent noble,' a soft voice purred from behind him.  
  
He spun and drew his sword in one smooth movement, the sharp point facing the direction of the voice, which had come from just inside the grove of sculpted trees at the side of the house to his right. He had sensed nothing, though he observed that the animals of the garden, the frogs and the grasshoppers and other insects, the horses in the stables, had fallen silent. It was almost as though time had stopped, so sudden was the unnatural silence in the barely lit black of night. There was no moon tonight.  
  
He sheathed his sword as he saw a woman emerge from the trees, though he remained wary. Her hair was raven black, almost blue as it reflected the moonlight. Her face was exquisite, with a small graceful nose and unusually large, innocent-looking eyes. Her lips were full, inviting, sensual. Unusually tall, beneath a pure white gown that covered her from her neck to her feet, her body was perfectly formed. She lacked any flaw, beyond skin that was pale even by the standards of Roman women. She moved with an easy grace, showing neither fear nor deference. Quite the most beautiful woman in his extensive acquaintance, she should have been familiar, and yet he had never seen her before.  
  
'You have me at a loss, madam,' he told her, his voice coldly polite, for he did not enjoy being startled, especially when buried in thought. 'And I might ask you how you were allowed on to my estate.'  
  
'Your guards are vigilant,' she told him, her voice soft, almost sibilant, as enticing as the eyes of a cobra. 'But they presented little challenge to me.' She looked beyond him for a brief moment. 'Do you not find the city beautiful at night, the lights flickering in the starlight?'  
  
'My definition of beauty is not so refined,' he answered her, being drawn into conversation against his better judgement. He was unused to having this sort of reaction to woman, long inured to their mostly superficial charms. 'And I would still ask who you are and what you require of me.'  
  
She laughed, a silver tinkle in the still and silent air. 'Require of you, general?' she asked scornfully, looking straight into his eyes. 'Ask rather what it is you require of me.'  
  
'Your name,' he demanded flatly, resisting the near-hypnotic compulsion of her naked sensuality.  
  
'Julia Erenia,' she told him, without expression, moving slowly towards his left  
  
Now he laughed, a sound seldom heard, indeed he thought his throat protested at the unfamiliar movement. 'Unfunny, madam, or merely ill- informed. The Erenia family vanished from Rome three hundred years ago with the deposition of the last king by the Senate.' He watched her move slowly around him, turning to keep her always in sight. He had seen predators stalk their prey before, and found the reversal of positions exquisite.  
  
'Has it been so long?' she breathed, gently picking a rose from the tree beside her, closing her eyes as she inhaled the scent. 'It seems only yesterday since Romulus Superus held the throne.'  
  
'Do you claim immortality, like a Homeric heroine?' he asked her. 'You are no goddess, for there are no gods.'  
  
'I am no god,' she told him, moving closer and handing him the rose. He briefly touched the skin of her hand. It was colder than ice, but the texture was inhumanly smooth. He shivered once with unaccustomed pleasure. Her voice dropped to a bare whisper. 'But I can grant your wish, general.'  
  
'And that would be?' he asked her, leaning in so that he could hear her.  
  
'Immortality.'  
  
  
  
Buffy slowly pushed herself from the wall slowly, crashing back to the reality of the grim, cold darkness of the Russian winter, away from the gentle evening of Roman summer. She cursed softly, not knowing if someone had slipped something into her breakfast, whether she was dreaming while awake, or whether or not she was truly linked to a vampire that had weathered the millennia. None of the possibilities were acceptable.  
  
'What the hell does it mean?' she asked herself in English, earning a suspicious look from a militia officer patrolling the quiet streets. She flashed him her most winning smile, though it fell far short of what she might have been able to muster mere months before. He smiled back nervously, and hurried on through the snow and chill air of the narrow street, vanishing quickly into the gloom of the poorly lit area.  
  
Buffy, Spike is behind this door, she told herself, steeling herself once again to meet her lover of seven months before. She had much to tell him and, if Jur'Khan Chung was to be believed, little time in which to do it. She would figure out the meaning of the odd visions later, if there was time. A vampire alone she knew she could deal with. Had she not killed the Master?  
  
Forsaking courtesy as a waste of precious time, and desperate in her eagerness, she leaned back and delivered a crushing side kick that shattered the wooden door into a thousand pieces that scythed inwards like shards of glass. Taking one deep breath, she marched through the ruined doorway into the dark room beyond.  
  
The room was dingy, requiring a thorough cleansing. Bits of rubbish and empty bottle that reeked of strong spirits were strewn around like paper. The floor was rotting, worm infested woods, the ceiling low and flaking, decrepit plaster falling from it like snow in the sudden rush of wind from the door.  
  
At the far end of the room was a crumpled bed, unmade in an age, and covered with filthy blankets that looked as though they had been scrounged from an animal shelter.  
  
On it sat Spike, staring at her, his deep blue eyes buried in shadow in the darkness of the few candles that lit the room poorly. Dressed in habitual black, though unkempt, his duster was tossed carelessly on the floor in front of him. Alone, he simply stared at her as her leapt at the sight of him, relief flooding through her at the end of her search, mingled only with the joy of seeing his face again, tempered only slightly by the apprehension that she felt at his possible reaction.  
  
She stood, all the practised speeches that she has prepared for this very moment melting away at the sight of his bleached hair and sculpted figure.  
  
The book he had been reading dropped unnoticed to the floor, the faint sound like thunder in the sudden silence of the dingy, dark chamber.  
  
'Slayer?' he asked her, his voice faint. He rose slowly from the bed, coming into the faint light. 'Buffy?'  
  
He was as she remembered.  
  
That was the last conscious thought that she had as something hard and metallic crashed across the back of her neck, knocking her out cold. She had time to hear one final word.  
  
It was said through a snarl of animal fury.  
  
'Dru.' 


	5. Chapter 5

Buffy dreamed.  
  
She sat, cross legged, on a tightly cut green lawn, dew glistening and reflecting the bright sunlight. Around her on three sides was a copse of short, well cut trees, perfectly sculpted products less of nature than attention to detail. They swayed slightly in the light wind that relieved the heat, the climate pleasant and soothing. She closed her eyes and relaxed, enjoying the feel of the warm breeze on her face, a slight smile on her face. She felt the damp grass beneath her, the rustle of the bright green leaves on the trees surrounding her. Wearing a white, ankle length robe with a light blue sash hanging from her left shoulder to her right hip, with laced sandals on her feet, her arms bare, she knew that she should not be here, she knew that she was dreaming, but the garden was so peaceful that she could not quite grasp where it was she should be.  
  
She felt a slight bump beside her, and opened her eyes, but slowly, feeling no threat.  
  
Beside her sat a man, his skin bronzed with the sun, older than her by maybe five years. He was well built and handsome, his features strong, his dark eyes glowing with hidden amusement. Though he seemed young enough, his eyes betrayed more than his years, seeming ancient and weighed down with the experience of ages. On his broad, square shoulders hung a crimson cloak, over polished steel armour, engraved with a the head of a curled cobra, its vacant metal eyes seeming to follow her. Belted to his arms, criss-crossed with scars, were bronze greaves, and at his side hung a sword. She recognised him. She remembered the visions that had been plaguing her, and she knew that they came from him, the man called Legion. But unlike before, she felt no threat from him, no animus or hostility. If anything, she felt a kinship that she could not understand. Above all of that was a physical desire for him that seared through her. She had to hold herself still to prevent herself from sinking into his arms, despite him giving off no indication that he felt the same way. This before a word was even spoken. This with Spike still foremost in her mind.  
  
He smiled slightly, his eyes never leaving hers, seeming somehow darker even in the bright early morning sun. 'You are the Slayer,' he told her, settling beside her, leaning back, his head turned towards her. 'Buffy Summers. She who destroyed the Master, sent Angelus to hell, destroyed Glorificus.' He bowed his head once. 'My compliments.'  
  
'Who are you?' she asked him. Though she had only Jur'Khan Chung's assurance, she knew that Legion was not his real name. 'And where am I?'  
  
He looked around. 'You are dreaming, girl,' he told her. 'In reality, you hang from rusted chains in a damp cellar with a mistress of torture waiting in the shadows for you to awake to attend to her most sadistic desires.'  
  
She looked away, towards the horizon that lay at the end of what looked like an endless expanse of grass. 'And here?'  
  
'Here? Here, you lie on the grass, an image of an estate that I once owned in what is now southern France. I thought it best to prepare you for what you face in pursuit of your desires.'  
  
She smiled slightly, a bare shift of her lips. 'Why is it that more vampires in the last day have offered to help me than in all of my life before now?'  
  
'I am no ordinary vampire,' he answered her in his deep voice, rising gracefully to his feet and offering her his hand. She took it, and rose also to stand beside him.  
  
'We do not have a great deal of time before Drusilla tires of waiting for you to awake on your own and hastens the process,' he told her, his voice becoming cold as he referred to the infamous vampiress. 'By now she had learned that William … Spike … as you call him, has left far behind what remaining vestiges of affection remained for her.' Buffy's heart leapt. 'She will have learned that his unbeating heart and demon soul belong solely to you. She will leave him alive for the greater pleasure that she will enjoy in watching him watch you slowly suffer and die a forgotten death.'  
  
Buffy shook her head. 'No,' she replied, becoming nervous for the first time since she had arrived here. 'Spike will stop her. She can't stand against us both.'  
  
He looked at her, taking her hand. 'She can now,' he told her, his voice betraying his sincerity. 'She is far more powerful than you remember her, far more powerful than the two of you combined. She could swat either or both of you aside without the slightest effort. She, like myself and a few others, has transcended what it means to be a vampire. Unlike us, she has not acquired the experience to temper her desires. She is pure power and fury unleashed. There are few left alive to stop her.'  
  
'Can you?'  
  
'I am coming,' he told her. 'Believe me, I am coming as fast as I can. Not for you, I care little for Slayers, nor for your lover, for whom I care even less. But Drusilla is my match in power and strength – only my age and experience will give me the victory that my vengeance requires. Your blood, the pure unadulterated blood of one of the most powerful Slayers who has ever lived, would tip the balance against me. And I would be unable to help you.'  
  
'What about Jur'Khan Chung?' she asked him, unsure of what side to take, or whether to simply stand aside.  
  
His eyes grew cold. 'He has involved himself in a game that is beyond him for the sake of avenging a woman who cared nothing for him. I will deal with him if I can get past Drusilla.'  
  
'Why is she so powerful?'  
  
He looked towards the horizon, towards which the reddening sun was sinking fast. 'We have little time left. Suffice it to say that she stole something from me, something that cannot be replaced no matter how many more millennia I live, something that gave her such power as normally takes thousands of years to accumulate. I had intended it for another. For that Drusilla will die. But you must survive for a while longer, you must ensure that she does not feed from you.'  
  
Buffy felt the first stirrings of despair. 'How? If she is that powerful.'  
  
He smiled, one last time, as night fell and her vision began to waver, as she felt herself being dragged away by the first stirrings of pain. 'Tell her that she not escaped me. Tell her that she will never escape the vengeance of Patricius Quintus Eranus.'  
  
  
  
Buffy stirred, being ripped from the pleasant haven of her dreams to the harsh reality of the damp cellar of which she had been told. It was dark, lit by spluttering torches that gave off the claustrophobic smell of burning tar. Water dripped with slow monotony to the floor, echoing around the dank chamber. The ceiling was low, almost to Buffy's head.  
  
Unable to see much beyond five feet, the first thing of which the Slayer became aware was the sharp pain of metal digging into the soft flesh of her wrists as she hung on rusted chains from the roof. Sighing softly with discomfort, she levered herself from the floor with tired, rubbery legs, shifting herself upright, feeling the brush of the ceiling on her hair. She pulled once at the manacles that bound her, but they gave not one inch. She pulled again, harder, grunting with the effort, and felt one begin to loosen, but it would come not further. Straining to see, all she could sense was that she was surrounded by gloom without visible end.  
  
No, that was not all that she could sense. Her right side tingled, meaning only one thing, that a vampire was near. She stiffened once her foggy mind began to clear and scream at her that she was uncomfortably close to a creature that lived only to feed from her. She was about to pull away when she felt something in front of her, also. There were two.  
  
There was a click to her right, and a brief burst of flame that illuminated the chamber with soft, sickly yellow light. She gasped once.  
  
Spike lit the cigarette dangling from his lips, his expression impassive as he looked at her. She lost herself for a moment in the depth of his ice blue eyes, then pulled away, knowing that she could afford to take nothing for granted, despite what she had been told in her dream by the vampire who had, at last, identified himself.  
  
Her lover, the man for whom she had searched these last five months, stood about ten feet from her, staring at her coldly. She shivered once. She had not seen him regard her in that fashion since they had first met, outside the Bronze what seemed like a lifetime of experience and agony before.  
  
'Slayer,' he greeted her, his voice level, and colder than the grave. She did not recognise his tone. Even when angry, he had always been so full of life, but now he seemed more dead than the corpses of his past victims. 'Long time.'  
  
'Spike,' the answered, her voice equally cold. She ignored the rush of bile in her throat, the physical manifestation of the deep hurt that dragged down her rapidly beating heart. She straightened.  
  
If her time searching was wasted, so be it. She would not let him see her disappointment, the shattering of the illusions about the depth of the love that he felt for her that he had assured her had suffused his entire being in a manner that could never die. A tear fell from her eye, though she knew that even he could not see it in the dark, the silver lighter in front of his face, making it glow as yellow as his eyes when feeding.  
  
She felt once again the bitter ache of betrayal, that just as she had once more allowed herself to open to a man he ripped himself from her in such a way as to ensure the maximum pain. Her heart heavy in her chest, she stood as defiantly as possible, ignoring the chains, looking straight into his eyes.  
  
'Dru took your sorry ass back, then?' she taunted, trying her best to keep her voice from cracking. Of all the ways that she imagined they would meet again, this was one that she had never thought, so certain she had been that his love for her had been as pure as that she felt only when he left. 'I'm surprised that she took the time.'  
  
A dreamy voice came from the shadows in front of her, unseen but powerful. 'My boy couldn't stay away,' Drusilla's voice drifted from the darkness. 'The past was chasing me, and only the present could protect me.'  
  
'That's right, pet,' he told her, the fondness in his voice unmistakable. Another small part of Buffy's soul crumbled. She tried to steel herself against the pain, the relief afforded her in the dream forgotten. She was so tired, and it hurt too much. 'Only your pretty boy could defend you.'  
  
Drusilla, ethereal in her dark beauty, emerged at last from the shadows of the cellar. She wore a flowing white gown, embroidered with lace, contrasting perfectly with her flowing, raven black hair that cascaded over her shoulders.  
  
The last remnant of the defiance of reality to which the Slayer had vainly clung disappeared. Desirable though she knew herself to be, in body and mind, she realised for the first time that she could never compete with the dark, powerful beauty of Drusilla. In a any choice between his two former loves, Spike could only ever choose his first. Buffy, with her youthful exuberance and all-American vivaciousness, was but a poor shadow of Drusilla's age-honed darkness. And to which would a Master vampire be more easily attracted to when distance from both had leant him perspective?  
  
'Come back to me, my boy has,' Drusilla crooned smoothly. 'Couldn't stay away from his queen, knew that he couldn't be happy without me. And the two of us are going to bathe Europe with blood.' Her alabaster face became dreamy. 'Just like the old days.' She began to pout. 'Just like the days when we were with Daddy and Grandmum.'  
  
Spike, seeing her distress in a manner that cut Buffy almost more than anything he or Dru had said, immediately moved through the oppressive gloom to her side, taking her head and placing it on his shoulder. They looked so well-matched that Buffy had to think about nothing but control to stop herself breaking down in tears at the betrayal. 'There, there, luv,' he said to her softly. 'We don't need them to have a great time. We'll make them all think that the Ripper has returned. They'll all drown in their own blood.'  
  
'Yes, they will,' she agreed, turning to the Slayer as she rested against Spike, his cheek on the top of her head. Drusilla stared at Buffy with undisguised malice. The Slayer tried to pull on her chains, but there was no give in them at all. 'We'll have to start with her, pretty Spike. She needs an education. Like those fairy boys with the bow ties and long coats, back home.'  
  
'I don't think they take cheerleaders at Eton, luv,' he corrected her gently, pulling away and removing his duster, which he threw carelessly on the ground. He flexed his well-toned muscles ominously. 'But she does need to learn whose heart she shouldn't mess with.'  
  
Buffy felt a mounting dread the likes of which she did not remember feeling since she had first fought Glory and realised how outmatched she truly was. The dream in which she had been buried before waking to this hell vanished as her mind was dominated by the simple task of survival.  
  
She remembered Spike looking at her in the way he was now. It had been in the sunlight, when he had the Ring of Amarra, when all his thoughts had been concerned with vengeance. She never thought that she would see that look of pure hatred and contempt again. She could smell the alcohol from him, she knew that he had been drinking heavily, but that somehow made it worse as she remembered the old Latin expression, in vino veritas.  
  
'And she'll learn the lesson good,' Drusilla whispered, her eyes hooded, her face half in the shadows.  
  
Buffy closed her eyes against the agony that followed.  
  
  
  
She awoke slowly, her entire body burning. She still hung from the chains but this time she lacked the strength to lever herself up against the wall despite the harsh, cold iron cutting into her skin A trickle of blood flowed down her left arm from the cut that had been made by the iron, but she ignored it, knowing without being able to see in the dark, torch lit cellar that her entire body ran red with blood. Slayer's blood. Summer's blood. Blood that days before she would willingly have given to Spike as a token of her apology had been forced from her in a hundred cuts, delivered by the artistry of torture learned in a century and a half by Drusilla.  
  
Spike, she remembered, had done little. But he didn't have to. He had stood by, his smirk on his face as he indulged every one of Drusilla's sadistic whim. He had handed her the prongs, the knives, the cigarettes and the pliers. He had been as responsible for her agony as his Sire. All the months of searching, wanting only to tell him what he needed to know, wanting only to feel his embrace again, and it ended here.  
  
The company of another betrayed love, an insane vampiress gone mad with power that she had stolen from a vampire lord whose name Buffy through her haze of pain could not recall. Patrick something. Something Roman.  
  
Her clothes hanging from her bruised and lacerated body, she sighed, then moaned with the pain from her fractured ribs. The smell of burning tar mingled with the smell of burnt flesh and her own blood. She moaned again, this time with despair.  
  
'I loved you , Spike,' she croaked, her voice unrecognisable even to her own ears. She forgot when she had stopped screaming.  
  
She felt a tingle from her front, and stiffened, steeling herself against the wave of pain from her spent muscles. Vampire, was all that she could tell. Her eyes swollen closed, she could not tell who or what it was.  
  
'Its come to this, Slayer,' came a hard male voice with a cockney accent. The voice that haunted her dreams and preoccupied her waking thoughts for the past five months, the voice that had assured her countless times of his love.  
  
The voice that she had heard only hours before laughing as she screamed as Drusilla rammed the stake into the half-plugged, seeping wound in her side. More than the pain, though, the betrayal shattered her. For the first time, she truly understood the death wish of the Slayer.  
  
'Spike,' she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. 'Come to give me some more?' Something occurred to her, and she almost laughed. 'Come to give me a second go?'  
  
He stared at her broken, half naked body as it hung limply from the chains, his face expressionless. He looked behind him once, through the darkness beyond, and sighed.  
  
Pulling a small, battered stool from beyond the shadows, he sat quietly in front of her. Lighting a cigarette, the lighter playing shadows on his smooth, angular face, he simply sat, in silence.  
  
She stared back at him, a dozen emotions battling within her for control. A deep lassitude finally settled over her, too deep even for anger to gain a foothold.  
  
'Why did you come after me?' he asked her after a pregnant pause that seemed to last an age. He sounded tired, more tired than she had ever heard him.  
  
She was in no mood for pity. 'I guess I was stupid enough to believe you when you told me that you loved me,' she told him, trying not to remember what Dawn had told her about how he had behaved when she was dead. The pain now, emotional and physical, was so much more real than any memories, even of more recent events. 'I felt guilty for beating you in the alley, and …' she stopped, unwilling to share anything with him now. 'I wanted to apologise.'  
  
He barked a laugh that sounded strained even for him. For the first time since she had met him, his voice last all traces of his normal accent, becoming articulate and upper-class, like a British lord. 'You wanted to say sorry?' he asked. 'You wanted to say, "oh, sorry I beat you senseless in a dark alley, sorry that I feel so little for you that I'm okay with using you for a punching bag." Why do I find that difficult to believe, Buffy?'  
  
Her spirits lifted for a brief moment when she heard him address her by her name, but then she remembered where she was and to whom he was now answering.  
  
'Because it's the truth,' she told him. 'The simple truth.'  
  
He snorted. 'There's nothing simple about truth, luv,' he told her. 'It always hurts someone.' He leaned forward, his pale face ghostly in the candlelight. 'Why are you really here?'  
  
She stared at him, having forgotten how deep were his eyes, like storms on the ocean. She remembered seeing them for the first time, that night in the alley behind the Bronze, how she had for a moment lost herself in those eyes, how that for a moment she had forgotten that it was her destiny and calling to kill him and his kind.  
  
She shook herself, feeling once again the chains as she hung weakly against the wall, her clothes hanging from her in strips that made her flesh crawl beneath Spike's gaze, which contained nothing of the former love or lust that had once characterised every gesture of his around her. It was, once again, the cold gaze of the predator.  
  
'I came to tell you that I was sorry, Spike,' she told him, resting against the chains, her entire body afire with agony that did not compare to the hurt that she felt within. 'Is that so hard to believe, that I simply wanted to say that I was sorry.'  
  
He rose smoothly from the stool, taking a deep drag from his cigarette and crushing it nonchalantly against the hard stone of the cellar. 'I'm afraid that it is, luv,' he told her, looking directly at her, the grey smoke rising around him. 'You'll do well to get out of this place alive, and you telling me that you're sorry won't change it. I left that miserable Californian toilet because I finally gained some sense, some notion about myself, that no matter how much I did for you or how much I loved you, you were just too damned stupid to see it. What is it you want me to believe, that you wanted to say that you were sorry? Maybe you could have said that that night in the alley, when I stopped you from pissing your life away.' Despite the obvious sincerity of his words and the feelings behind them, his tone never changed from the same dead monotone. She had never heard him speak like that before, not even when beaten to within an inch of his … life … by Glory.  
  
'You could have said sorry when threw my love back in my face in that shattered building when we first had sex. You could have said sorry a dozen times. You could have said sorry for ever assuming that you could know the strength of my feelings.' At last, some emotion crept into his voice, a slight quivering of pure fury and frustration. At last, he became Spike once again, not a soul-dead imitation. 'Me, Slayer. Me, who loved the same woman without straying for a century or more. You could doubt the sincerity of my feelings, knowing that? You never questioned the feelings of the sprog, Finn, and he had barely begun shaving. You trusted adolescent desire then. You never doubted the sincerity of Angel, when all he wanted was to atone for a century of sin by grasping at the easiest straw that he could. But I, who loved with my heart and soul, you couldn't trust. Me, who-'  
  
'I was pregnant,' she said softly. 'Our daughter Spike. She was so lovely. Even stillborn, she was lovely.'  
  
The silence became deafening. 


	6. Chapter 6

            It was out in the open now, the truth that had driven her across the world more than any feeling of love that she genuinely cherished. She looked once again into his eyes, seeing only the impassive stare of a vampire that she no longer recognised as the man she had come to love so deeply when he was absent, and with which she had treated with nothing but callous cruelty when he was around.

            The baby had changed her feelings more than any act of his, but it was apparently not enough for him as he simply stared at her, his cigarette glowing in the darkness, burning down, forgotten. She was telling the pure truth, but she did not know if he trusted her any more enough to believe it.

            The only evidence was buried in a tiny, hand-crafted coffin in the Sunnydale cemetery. Their daughter, Elizabeth. Five months premature, and dead within minutes. She slumped against the wall, the forgotten pain rushing back as her despair mounted. The only tangible evidence of their love, their dead daughter. For Spike was truly, once again, Drusilla's creature. 

            Through eyes closed against the tears that threatened to engulf her as her last vestige of enthusiasm for life dwindled and she felt once again the rise of the death wish that before she had been grimly told was the curse of every Slayer, she heard his whisper.

            'I had a daughter?' she heard him ask, his voice so soft that it was almost lost behind the sound of water dripping against the stone.

            She opened her eyes, looking up at him through the limp tendrils of her uncared-for hair, her head still bowed. She could feel the dark circles under her eyes as she watched him, but she could also hear the dazed awe that suffused his rich voice.

            'Yes,' she told him, beating down with experienced disillusion the faint stirrings of hope that welled within. 'Five months ago. I realised that I was pregnant two weeks after you left. She was born five months later.'

            'A child?' he whispered. He moved closer, slowly, lacking now the smooth grace of the predator. For a brief moment, through the shadows, he looked more human than ever she had seen him before.

            'A daughter, Spike,' she continued. 'She was born prematurely, and died within minutes. But she looked at me for a moment, William.' She deliberately used his original name, the better to try to get through to him. 'Just for a moment. She had your eyes. The same blue eyes.'

            He stood perfectly still, his cocked slightly to the side, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and clear. 

            But he said nothing.

            'Do you not believe me?' she asked. At that moment, she could tell, she was not the victim and he not the one in control. At that moment, they were who they always were - diametrically opposed people, with an incomprehensible connection. 'Because if you don't, I can show you the grave, I can show you the medical records, the birth certificate, the-'

            'I believe you,' he told her, breaking his silence, his voice softer than she remembered hearing it since … since she was brought back, she realised. His expression was the same as the moment when he had first seen her on the stairs, weak and shaking, her hands bloodied and bruised. Her heart melted as she saw him, and heard him, but she showed nothing. 

            'Its happened before,' he continued. 'I never thought that it could happen with me. Something to do with the uniqueness of the line of Aurelius, some spell that Nest … the Master … had cast on the line centuries ago, when he was searching for the Anointed One. He believed that the child would be of his own blood, meaning his own seed. He never conceived, but I know that Angelus had a child with Darla before she died.'

            He must have seen the shock in her face. 'I keep current,' he told her wryly. Slowly, he removed his duster, folding it carefully and placing it on the stool behind him.

            He moved towards her slowly. Despite the pain, despite her clothes hanging in rags where Drusilla had used both knives and burning coals, despite the manacles biting into the soft skin of her wrist, she could feel every movement that he made as though they were her own.

            The first thing that she felt was the soft touch of his fingers, lightly brushing across her cheek. The candles burned around him, lending the air an ethereal glow. He moved his hand up her face, slowly, tracing a pattern known only to him, moving his fingers through her hair. The water, dripping monotonously, continued to echo through the chamber, the only noise. Closing her eyes, she leaned into his touch forgetting, as she had before, what he was and what he had done, knowing only in her sensation-numbed mind that this was a man who loved her totally, without reservation. With the kind of strength of feeling that no one she had ever known could offer her, a strength to match her own.

            Her eyes closed, she felt his cold lips against hers, the kiss passionate and tender at the same time, powerful but subtle. She leaned into it, pulling at the chains, yearning to bury herself in him, in his power and the strange warmth that came from his cold body, a warmth that she was sure only she had ever felt.

            She felt the chains snap, and the kiss broke. For a moment, she stared into his eyes as he lifted her from the wall, noticing once again the clear beauty. Then the injuries came flooding back, and she sagged against him. He lifted her easily, and placed her gently on the ground, using his duster as a pillow.

            He stroked her hair again, murmuring softly to her. 'I had a daughter,' he whispered.

            'She was beautiful, Spike,' she told him as he sat beside her. 'Perfect. For the few minutes that she was alive, she was exquisite.' She pushed herself up, the stone freezing and damp, a shallow puddle of stagnant water just under her. 'They said that there was something wrong with me, something that made it impossible for me to have children. They said they had no idea how I had become pregnant in the first place.'

            'Slayers never have children,' he told her, his voice soft, his tone bitter. 'Don't know why.' He grunted. 'A Slayer bearing the child of a master vampire. The daughter of Buffy Summers and William the Bloody. Elizabeth.' 

            'You left before I found out,' she told him, an edge of bitterness entering her voice. She loved Spike, and had suffered enough to be able to finally admit to herself, and to him, but there were some things that were difficult to easily forgive. The fresh scars on her body were the least of them. 'Just like Angel, just like Riley. You left.'

            He reached across for her, his face pleading, but she pulled away and stood, albeit with some difficulty, her leg muscles sore and strained.

            He looked up, not bothering to rise, content to sit in her shadow, cast by the dim candlelight. 'I had to leave, Buffy,' he told her, his voice dead. 'It hurt me more than anything that has ever happened to me in a hundred and fifty years, but I had to leave. I couldn't just hang around and hope that you would realise what your feelings were, pulling me in and pushing me away at the same time. It was torture.'

            'No, Spike,' she replied. '_This was torture. Having our baby and seeing it die was torture. Knowing that the one man in my life who loved me for everything that I was leaf just as I began to realise what I felt, that was torture.'_

            'Being beaten in an alley because I didn't want you to throw away your life was fun, by contrast, I suppose,' he asked sarcastically.

            She closed her eyes and sighed. 'When I said I wanted to find you to say sorry, I meant it, Spike.'

            'I know you did, luv,' he told her, rising. He drew her to him, and she sagged against his chest. Her throat began to burn as she fought to keep the tears down. 'I know you did.'

            With Angel, her feelings had been manipulated by the childish expectations of what she had been told by countless books and films of what love was like, of the certainty with which it was felt and the absolute sureness of the truth of an emotion so powerful that it could not be described to someone who had never felt it. Scarred by his leaving, the dashing of the fondest hopes of her early childhood before the darkness of her calling covered her, she retreated to what she fondly imagined was the simplicity of Riley, only to learn that he was far from simple, the product of years of training, subtle mind-control, and narcotics. But she had clung to the illusion, hoping that one day she would forget that it _was an illusion. The shattering of her last tie to the world in which her friends could choose to move freely but abandoned only through loyalty to her was the worst moment of her life. Seeing Riley leave in the military chopper as she ran to try to convince him of the depth of her feelings was like __seeing her last chance disappear._

            And then Spike. Always a constant in a life that had precious few others. The one thing that she could be sure of was the purity of his hate and malice, the sheer malevolence. That was why she had not killed him when she had had the chance, when he had come to her for help that Thanksgiving. Of all the things in her life that could and did change, as she saw Xander and Willow gradually slip into their own niches, leaving less time for what they had as a group in Sunnydale High, Spike remained a constant. When he had told her that he loved her, when he had Drusilla chained to a post, when he held the stake above her unbeating heart and when she had seen the anguished sincerity in his eyes, and believed him, she could no longer deny it to herself that the darkness was as much a part of her of the light for which she fought. To fight evil in a pit, one had to become dirty. That was how she had felt that night - dirty, sullied by everything that Spike professed to feel.

            She knew that when she had hatefully spat that he could not love without a soul, she was deliberately lying. She knew that he could, that other vampires could. But what was love to them? Was it the same as it was to people, the unconditional surrender of feeling, the willingness to be completely vulnerable in the knowledge that the other person was feeling the same? Or was it far darker, rooted in base urges and a need for gratification that were alien to her? She had wondered to herself, some nights when alone and in the dark, listening to Willow cry herself to sleep because she was alone, if she returned Spike's feelings, would they be hers? Or his? Would it be the love of which she had always read and seen, or would it be something else entirely?

            It had taken the birth of Elizabeth, and her quick death moments later, to understand that it didn't matter. It had taken a baby, the purest symbol of the love that they felt for each other, for her to realise that it was real. And when their daughter died, as she held her in her arms, her face bathed in sweat from labour, her body aching from the effort, she realised that she had made that effort because something positive had to come from what had existed between herself and the vampire that had stolen her soul.

            When Elizabeth died, her heart broke. But the need to tell Spike what she felt for him, and what the result of those feelings had been, had kept her sane.

            Standing in the cellar, his arms around her, shielding her from everything while the tears flowed in soft rivers down her drawn face, all the repression of the last five months vanished as the need for it evaporated.

            She wept for their daughter.

            Her knee wet from kneeling in a pool of stagnant water, Buffy buried her head in Spike's chest and wept, her tears falling slowly down her cheeks. She felt his hand gently move the length of her cheek to wipe away the water, and felt solace in the touch of his cold skin. But it would take far more for the memories to vanish that easily, for the anguish to retreat into the small, forbidden corner of her mind where lay the rest of the hurt and betrayal that she had experienced. 

            Her sobbing slowly ceased, as he crouched above her in silence, waiting for the emotions that she felt to play themselves out. His hand moved away from her face to caress the burns and the cuts that she had been forced to endure at the cruel, though skilled, hands of Drusilla's expert torture. His lover was a mistress of her craft, with a vocation for the infliction of pain that would have impressed the most brutal servant of any medieval despot, and she brought tools of modern agony to bear in a way of which they would have been jealous. That pain, she knew, as she felt her throat gradually relax from the coarseness caused by the repression of her deep sadness and anger, was greater within her heart, the heaviness that weighed it down only slightly ameliorated by Spike's presence. 

            Nor could she yet relax.

            She gently pulled away, to sit on the floor opposite him. He tried, ever so faintly, to keep her close, but for the moment she needed distance more than she needed his touch. Though she had longed for it for what seeemed an eternity, for this she needed not to feel his hands, for that way lay only the oblivion of ecstasy, the end of rational thought. And she needed to think.

            'Spike,' she breathed, keeping her eyes on his, trying not to see the rest of the chamber, the spluttering candles and the stench of death. 'What are you doing here? Why are you back with Drusilla?'

            The silence hung between them, empty but full of anger and disappointment.

            'Long story, luv,' he replied at length, rising smoothly, his duster hanging about him like a cloak in the darkness.

            She said nothing, waiting.

            He sighed, hanging his head and turning away, addressing the far wall rather than her eyes, so much older than they had been even a few months before.

            'Left you behind ten months ago, Buffy,' he told her, his voice reflective. 'Left you and Dawn, Sunnydale, everything. What we had was everything and nothing of what I wanted when I realised that I was in love with you.' Once again, his voice had lost all traces of his accent. For one of the first times, he was showing her more than the image that he projected with such practiced skill that it had become a second skin. 'I wanted to be close to you, as close as I could be, but there was nothing coming from you but lust. I knew that you felt more, I knew that there was something there, that you would never have let me do any of the things that you did without feeling something, but until you realised it I might as well have been nothing more than your whore. I didn't want that, Buffy.' He turned to face her. 'I wanted everything. I _deserved everything.'_

             She said nothing, for there was nothing that she could say. She knew that he was right, she had known that he was right for months. She had become used to the guilt that she felt, it was a compliment to the anger that she felt at both him, and herself. 

            He reached down and took her hand in his, his cold skin against hers. 'But I _never left with the intention of not coming back, luv. You have to believe that. I just wanted to get away for a while, maybe no more than a month. I just needed time away from you for a while to clear my head, to try to sort out what it was I felt for you, to try to figure out what it was that I wanted.' He smiled slightly, a sad smile, the likes of which she had never seen from him before. It was only a pale shadow of his old, confident smirk. It was the sad smile of a broken man._

            'What happened?' she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

            'Heard something,' he answered shortly. 'Something about a vampire lord who was chasing Dru. I heard about it in San Francisco - that was where I went by the way, its the vampire capital of the West Coast, all the big boys live there. A guy called Legion was supposed to be chasing her across the world, she stole something from him.'

            The real face of Legion flashed across her mind, but she kept her battered face impassive. She did not want to yet reveal anything of the knowledge that she held. Less because she was still doubtful of Spike's loyalty, for she knew that he could have killed her whenever he wanted, and she could still fell the love in his touch, than because the strange bond that she felt with vampire prince forbade her on an instinctive level to reveal anything about it. She doubted that she could have even had she wanted to. 

            He continued. 'Most people don't have a clue who Legion is, they think that he is a myth, something used to scare the stupid. His name was being whispered through the dark streets like a scent on the wind, something to shy away from. But I know who and what he is. I met him once.'

            She kept the shock from her face with the skill of a liar of long habit, though inwardly she felt her heart begin to beat faster. She would never have believed that Spike could have met Quintus Eranus, that he could have survived the meeting. More than any creature that she had encounted, Patricius Quinus Eranus was _power, unlimited and unapproachable, relentless._

            'There was another rumour, that he had been chasing her because she had stolen something that he had intended for someone else, a treasure or some such that made vampire's incredibly powerful, something that would make the youngest fledgling more powerful than any but the oldest Master, even a Lord.'

            'The Charm of Ba'quavar,' she told him without thinking.

            He cocked his head to the side as he heard her, though she was barely looking at him, searching deep within for the origin of the knowledge. She knew, though she knew not how, what the Charm was, and what it did, but she still did not want Spike to know anything about the images that she had seen since she had arrived, or the dream that she had had when she had been waiting to awake to the malignant attentions of Drusilla. 

            'How do you know that, Slayer?' he asked, his voice devoid of the suspicion that covered his face, visible even through the shadows that half-obscured his angular visage.

            'Its a long story, Spike,' she told him. 'I'll tell you when I hear the rest of what you have to tell me. I promise.'

            He drew away from her in a manner which, she supposed. was earily similar to the way in which she had drawn away from him that morning in the crypt, when he had joked that they were actually having a conversation. She knew now what it felt like, and didn't like it. Indeed, she wondered how he could still feel for him after the things through which she had put him over and over again in a deadly cycle of denial. This, though, was worse.

            'Did you even come back for me at all, Slayer?' he asked, his voice low, and more menacing than she had heard it in a long time, back to the dark depths of their initial enmity. 'Or did you come for Dru? Did the Watcher send you on a quest to eliminate her once and for all? Do they think that they can?'

            She sighed with frustration, and tried to rise, shaking the broken chains above her in the process, the metallic noise echoing throughout the chamber, joining with splashing water.

            He pushed her back to the floor, roughly, more roughly than he had for what must have been years. There was hostility in his eyes now, the kind of hostility that she barely remembered. 

            'No, Spike,' she told him as earnestly as could manage through the fresh pain that landind hard on the stone caused her. 'Its hard to explain, really really hard.'

            'Try,' his voice cracked through the silence, remote and icy.

            She briefly went through all that she knew, though she left out any mention of Jur'Khan Chung, because she did not want Spike to know of the deal that she had struck with the vampire lord. Less because she had any qualms about it, but rather because she knew that it would make Spike think that there was even more danger to Drusilla and, while she was certain that he still loved her, even after the things through which she had put him in her quest to remain as remote as possible, she also knew that he would try his best to defend Drusilla. If nothing else, she was his Sire, and that still meant something, even to someone as against tradition as he.

            He listened carefully, though his face did not change, marble carved by a master sculptor, reflecting the light with all the angularity of carved crystal. 

            At length, she finished, and waited for his response. It was long in coming, the empty silence deafening in its own way, as he remained still and unmoving.

            'I believe you,' he replied at length, reaching down and giving her his hand.

            She took it carefully, wincing as he pulled her gently to her feet to face him, face to face for the first time in ten months and a lifetime of experience.

            He took his duster, picking it up casually, though his face was anything but casual, reflecting as it did a multitude of emotions that she had missed so much for so long.

            He placed it around her shoulders tentatively, as if unsure that she would be willing to accept that had been taken from the broken corpse of a former Slayer, something that represented the triumphs of what were, to him, a past life. She took it anyway, relishing the feeling of soft, well-worn leather against her skin, the smell of cigarettes and liquor, and the unique scent of the vampire that held her soul in his cold grip, with nothing stronger than the regard in which she held him after a multitude of trials of her own coldness. The sudden warmth, and the weight, almost made her swoon, and her knees wobbled.

            He caught her, seeing that she was about to fall, and their eyes locked, as they had so many times before, even to the first time that they had met, the time in the alley when he had sacrificed a minion with cold calculation merely to see how she fought.

            She was able to lose herself in the depths of those ice blue eyes. So lost was she that she was only barely aware of his lips edging closer to hers with infinite slowness. Their eyes remained locked for the whole time before the first shock of contact.

            Their lips met in a passionate lock that held within it, for the first time, a mutuality of love and affection, which made it sweeter a thousand fold than anything that she had experienced before. The _feeling contained within it made it more powerful than the physical, which itself was shattering. Their lips touching, their tongues running over each other with the desperate need of prolonged absence and the shared, separated fantasies of reunion, the kiss was the closest thing to paradise that the Slayer could imagine. It was not like the other times that they had kissed, when it had been about lust and a desperate, consuming passion that had little to do with feeling. He did nothing with his hands other than gently run them through her hair, slowly, as if unable to believe that she was once more in his embrace, or that this time her feelings matched his own with equal fervour coupled with equal desire. _

            They pulled away after an eternity of shared need, her feelings for him no longer repressed or buried by the pain of missing him, at last consummated by nothing any more impure than a kiss.

            'I'm so sorry, Buffy,' he told her. She was able to see the tears forming at the corner of his beautiful eyes, and had she been blind she would have been able to hear the anguish in his voice. 'I'm so sorry that I wasn't there. Had I known, I would never have left. I would have been there with you, in the hospital.'

            The pain rushed back, all the feeling of sorrow and grief, of lost opportunity, both in the past and, worse, for the future.

            'I know,' she told him softly, touching his face with her bloody hand. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek against her palm, relishing the touch of her as much as she did him. 'She was _us, Spike. She was the two of us, the only pure thing that we ever did together.' Her voice caught. 'Our daughter, Spike.'_

            'I know, pet,' he said to her, his voice also close to breaking. 'I'm so sorry.' He laughed shortly, bitterly. 'I could say it a thousand times, and it would never be enough for that.'

            She looked up at him, her face dirty and stained with tears. 'It is, Spike. You would never have left if I has not pushed you to it. If I had not pushed you away. If  I had not been so damned stupid and arrogant.'

            'Not stupid, luv,' he told her, easing her away, though keeping his hands on her shoulders as he looked directly at her. 'Not arrogant either. Just experienced. If I had been treated the same way that you had by the wankers that have screwed you over in the past, I probably would have reacted the same way. It was as much my fault as it was yours. I never should have allowed what happened that night in the wrecked building. It was too fast and too soon. It only confirmed everything you thought about how shallow you thought my feelings were. I should have been able to show you that I could have been more.' He took her chin in his hand gently as she closed her eyes against his touch. 'I can be more, Buffy. I think I've proved that to you.'

            'You did,' she told him, remembering both the torture that he had gone through at the hands of a God, and also the beating that he had endured _at her hands to stop her throwing away a life that at the time she had not valued. _

            That it had taken the stillborn product of their incomplete union to make her realise both the value and the sanctity of her life and that of others was a tragedy for which she alone could bear the blame.

            'Buffy,' he said, his voice lowering to a whisper. 'I love you, more than anything or anyone that I have ever known in more than a hundred and fifty years. If you never believe anything that I tell you, believe that.'

            'I believe it, Spike.' She swallowed, and closed her eyes. Though the words had been practised through endless, private repetition, they would not come with the ease that she had imagined countless times in the silence of her mind, accompanied by the loneliness of separation.

            Without warning, they came. 'I love you too, Spike. I always will, I promise.'

            'You're not my boy any more, Spike.'

            Of all the things that she had hoped or feared hearing when at last she summoned the courage to make the awful admission, that was the last.

            Drusilla, resplendant in the stolen power of a vampire prince, stood at the door, her eyes burning.


	7. Chapter 7

Buffy fell back against the hard stone with a muffled groan as Spike released her to spin and rise in one fluid motion that spoke volumes of his concern with the return of his dark beauty, who stood in the door in a shadowed silhouette of menace, her eyes glowing a faint red, illuminating the darkness. She wore a dark lace dress that reached to her ankles but left her upper chest bare in a vivid contrast of marble and obsidian. Her black hair cascaded past her shoulders like a princess of myth, but the danger that radiated from her in almost tangible waves would dispel the illusions of even the most romantic of poets. Beauty, yes, but such malevolence beneath.

Her shattered knee screaming at her, Buffy attempted to rise with as much energy as she could summon after withstanding the hours of skilled torture, but her body for once betrayed her, and it was all that she could do to half rise from the ground before falling back again with a moan of agony. Her knee was the core of the waves of pain, radiating out until they encompassed all of her being, but the lacerations on her stomach and chest burned nearly as hotly. Her head thumped rhythmically, nearly obscuring her eyesight so sharp was the pain. In Spike's loving embrace she had been nearly able to forget it, as she had been able to so nearly forget so much else including the tragedies with which she had been forced to deal in his long absence, but his tension and preparedness, focused entirely on the threat of Drusilla removed the last distraction. It was all that the Slayer could do to focus her eyes, and then all that she could see through the oppressive blackness was the perfect alabaster form of Drusilla, malignant child of the insatiable sadism of her first lover. Once more, though it was a needless distraction from the mortal threat in front of her and her love, she reflected on the burning fury that she harboured at Angel. Would that she had never met him.

Drusilla spoke, the ethereal, ghostly tones of her light voice drifting across the cellar like a fog, echoing. 'Do you stand between the Slayer and me, Spike?' she asked, all traces of insanity gone from her, her previous childlike innocence even in the depths of her darkness gone. She sounded formidably intent in a way that Buffy could not remember. She supposed that that intent was the last sight that Kendra had seen before she had her throat ripped out.

'Spike,' she whispered, looking up, seeing the unrelieved black worn by her love, almost invisible in the dim light of the Russian cellar. 

He silenced her with little more than a faint touch on her shoulder. 'You've come too far, Dru,' he told his Sire, his voice soft, but colder than the depths of a winter storm. Buffy prayed that she would never hear that tone directed at her, for its menace was barely hidden. 'Too far, and too bloody fast. That amulet was never meant for someone like you, someone that powerful. Christ, even a fledgling would be hard put to handle the kind of power that you have now.'

Squinting in the dim light as Drusilla moved slowly forward, her body held still, Buffy could just about make out a beautiful gold and silver filigree chain that hung around Drusilla's neck, a perfect onyx stone set in the centre. For some reason, there seemed as much threat from that stone as there was from its wearer.

'And you want to challenge that kind of power, my pretty boy?' Dru asked, her voice sibilant, loaded with meaning that Buffy could not fathom. 'You've seen what I can do, what I have done. Power like this is beyond even the oldest of us now, the weakness that we have become over the millennia. With power like this I can rival the Ancients. You know that, and you will still throw your life away for this girl, a girl who will never love you, and who will wither and die in a few decades even you if you are able to save her here, this day? That isn't like you, my William.'

Holding himself slightly in front of Buffy, shielding her prone and damaged body from whatever Drusilla had in mind, Spike replied, his voice still icy. 'We all change. Some things become more important as the years pass. You know that.'

Drusilla's gaze lighted on Buffy for a brief moment as she continued to move through the chamber, darkness seeming to grow behind her as she did so. The chill that Buffy felt when those dark eyes landed on her was greater than anything that she had ever felt. The Master was a benevolent Angel beside the insane, somehow unquenchable desire in those black eyes. Nest had wanted power. What Drusilla wanted, Buffy knew in an instant of dark realisation, was beyond the capacity or even comprehension of anything to grant. And what now stood in her way was a vampire who was hamstrung in his ability to resist by his need to protect a grievously injured Slayer. The irony would have been amusing had the setting been different. 

'We all change, my William,' Dru told him. 'Some of us in different ways. Some become weaker. You are but a shadow of my glorious, irreverent boy, the boy who cut bloody holes through Europe.' Buffy winced at the joy in Drusilla's voice as she remembered what Buffy wished that she could forget about Spike's blood-soaked past. 

'And … what?' he asked her, staying close to Buffy as she attempted, again, to rise. The pain almost drove her again into unconsciousness, but she hung on, trying as best she could to ignore it, but dealing with this kind of pain had never been part of any of her training. She grunted to herself as she struggled to her feet through a haze of pain. Any Watcher would have written her off at this stage of menace. 'You want to be the new Master? You want to inherit the arrogance of Nest? You want to challenge the Ancients?'

Buffy, having been able to rise, leaned heavily on Spike's leather clad shoulder, her face drawn and her body unreliable, barely hearing what her lover was saying, and understanding nothing of what she did hear. She knew that if it came to it she would be unable to do much in a fight against a vampire of the power, and maybe enhanced power, of Drusilla, but if was better to be standing. Through the thick leather of Spike's duster, she could feel his muscles more tense than she could ever remember them. A … man … who normally gloried in battle now, she knew, he feared it. She shuddered to think of what Drusilla had become for Spike to fear her that much, Spike who had withstood the full fury of a God without hope of escape, now feared his Sire more. Buffy had no troll hammer this time, nor strength to wield it if she had.

'I want power, my love. I want my family back, too. Darla is around somewhere, Angelus is always ready to come out and play. What about you, Spike? You abandon you family for the Slayer?'

'She is my family, Dru,' he told his Sire, his arm moving to encircle Buffy and hold her close as though the feel of her would lend him the strength that he needed to protect her. Through the pain, Buffy marvelled at both the words that he spoke and the iron certainty with which he spoke them, as though will alone would be enough to defy the strength of his Dark Queen. 'And I'm not abandoning anything so I can hold your coat while you assault the ranks of the Ancients.'

'No, my love, I don't suppose that you will.' Drusilla pondered the words, the last shred of her attachment to Spike and his century long loyalty to her finally vanishing against the strength of his love for the Slayer than he held prone in his arms. Buffy remembered the fervour with which Angel had responded to threats against her, but it was as nothing compared to the cold passion that Spike was summoning. He would fight and die for her, here and now, she knew. And she still had never felt more safe than she did now in his arms, the darkness encroaching as Drusilla moved in, the faint light of the candles around the room seeming to recede as though it, too, was afraid.

'Don't, Dru,' Spike told her, his jaw clenching. 'Don't make me hurt you. I don't want to do this again. Just let us go and you won't hear from either of us again.'

'You're right, my love,' she told him, almost purring. 'I won't.'

Buffy crumbled again to the floor with a scream of pain she crashed to the stone, a blur of black all that she could see as Drusilla moved with impossible speed to send Spike crashing against the stone wall, smashing the metal links of the chains that had recently held Buffy into small splinters of metal with the force of his impact. Buffy screamed again as she felt her lank and filthy hair being grabbed.

Hauled to her feet against the agony, she was held in one hand by the vampiress. She attempted to break free, but such was the strength of Drusilla's grip that she doubted that she could have done it were she at her peak, and she never remembered a time when she was further below it than she was now. She might as well have tried to fend of f a storm than break the iron grip in which she was held. Drusilla barely noticed her ineffectual flailing as Spike hauled himself up painfully, using the wall as a support, blood leaking from the side of his mouth as he favoured his left side. The force of the blow had obviously damaged his ribs.

'Let her go, Dru,' he warned his Sire as she dragged the Slayer towards him, until they were barely separated from him by a few feet. Buffy could smell the blood coming from his side, and see the stain spread on his black shirt. He was not yet badly hurt, she knew, and would heal, but he was weakened.

Never had she felt more helpless, and never had she hated the feeling more. Held securely by Drusilla as though she were an afterthought, it was more than she could do to put up any more the slightest semblance of a struggle. 

And even that was ignored as Drusilla reached across and grabbed Spike by his throat with her other hand, lifting him effortlessly and pinning him against the wall. Spike held in one hand, Buffy in the other, and she seemed to be barely sweating. Whatever it was she had stolen, it had indeed magnified her power many times. 

As Spike attempted futilely to break free, Drusilla smiled. It was the first real smile that Buffy had seen from the previously insane vampire, and it was unpleasant, for it held within it promise of torments as yet unimagined, and the will and power to carry them out. Formidable though she had been before at the height of her power, now she was truly terrifying.

She was purring again, the ease with which she could hold two of her most powerful enemies without apparent effort obvious. Buffy remembered fearing her when she was insane because of the sheer unpredictability of her actions, but now that the veil of her dementia had cleared revealing the pure malice of an ancient creature steeped in every cruel form of evil. 

'Want to see what the Slayer tastes like, my Spike?' Drusilla cooed, laying as much contempt on the form of address as she could, which was considerable for a daughter of nobility raised amid the rapier wit and restrained commentary of Victorian London. 'Want to see if it compares to the others?'

A faint smile lit Spike's face as he looked down at his Sire from where she was holding him by the throat at least a foot from the ground. A sneer would have been more in character for him a few years before, but this twist of his lips was replete mainly with a defiance that Buffy would not have suspected existed within him until a few months before, the defiance of a man who had seen his world crumble and had built for himself a new one, only to see that shatter in a forgotten alley.

'I know what she tastes like, Dru,' he told her, in tone that could have passed for nostalgia. 

The smile left Drusilla's face, to be replaced by a slowly mounting fury. 'Tastes better than you ever did, pet,' he continued relentlessly. His ice blue eyes never left her black orbs, pinning her with their intensity. 'Like the sweetest honey. You tasted like ashes. What's that feel like, Dru?' he pressed on, seeing and feeling the massive anger that his Sire was barely holding in as she held them both. 'What's it like to know that despite all that Angelus could do, and all that you could learn in a hundred and fifty years, a twenty one year old girl is better than you?' He snorted with contempt. 'Must be a blow to the ego.' 

She screamed in fury, and Buffy moaned with pain as her grip tightened. 'I'll let you know if I agree,' she snarled at him, throwing him to the left through the air. He landed hard, but was able to rise in time to scream, 'NO!' as Drusilla smiled faintly and wrenched Buffy's head to the side, raising her neck to drink. Drusilla's eyes were locked on Spike's as she slipped into her demon face and bent her head to drink, her fang's brushing Buffy's neck.

'Quintus Eranus said that you can run as far as you like, but you'll never be able to run far enough to get away from his vengeance,' Buffy whispered hoarsely as she felt Drusilla prepare to strike.

The vampire stopped, frozen, her fangs barely touching the soft skin of Buffy's throat. It was as though time was suspended as Buffy continued.

'You can convince yourself that you can take him if you need to,' the Slayer continued, going for the kill. 'You can delude yourself that you are enough with what you have stolen to be able to face anyone. But Patricius Quintus Eranus is more than even you can take. He's coming, and he's coming for you.'

Drusilla screamed with untrammelled fury, hurling Buffy from her in rage. She tumbled across the room, hitting the ground with a scream of agony that was drowned out by the howl of Drusilla's rage, which echoed throughout the chamber with such force that an Apocalypse would not have seemed out of place. The naked purity of her anger was awesome, though Buffy had to fight against the pain of her injuries to stay conscious long enough to appreciate it.

'Buffy?' Spike asked, hurrying to her side in spite of his own injuries which were bad enough themselves, bad enough that the scent of his blood when he was close outweighed the stagnant smell of the dark, fetid cellar. As he tried to help her to her feet while hurting her as little as possible, knowing nothing of what she had said to his Sire to send her to such heights of fury, the howl of rage petered out.

They both turned in time to see Drusilla standing still, resplendent in black lace, the full plenitude of the power that she had stolen radiating from her in waves that needed no interpretation to understand the threat that they represented. The Master himself seemed puny by comparison, Angelus a child, Spike a babe. Spike's Dark Queen had transcended her state and moved to something else, something that she would not have reached were to exist for another thousand years. Foot soldiers only in the Legions of Darkness, despised for the impurity of their blood, vampires were not meant to hold the level of power that Drusilla could now summon, enough to make the small cellar seem smaller still, to make the walls seem closer. 

'Quintus Eranus can challenge me if he wants to, girl,' Drusilla spat, the venom on her face terrifying in its intensity. 'Let him come, let him try. I might even keep you alive long enough to let you see me rip his head from his shoulders. I'll let you see what happens when someone challenges me now.'

'You won't get the chance,' came a deep, cold voice from the doorway. Before Buffy turned, she was able to see Drusilla's eyes narrow with hatred and malice as she, too, followed the voice.

Dressed in a dark grey suit of exquisite cut, with a light blue shirt and dark tie, stood the Roman vampire Patricius Quintus Eranus.

She remembered him from her dream, remembered the strong face and broad shoulders, the dark eyes that betrayed some humour known only to him, the bearing of a noble that the millennia could not erase, the gleaming silver armour and crimson cloak that he wore then making him no more striking than he was now, dressed as any prosperous man of the twenty first century might. And still, even lying on the ground in Spike's protective embrace, she could still feel the attraction that she felt for him suffuse her. She had felt nothing like it before. Not when she had first met Angel, not when she had first seen Riley, not even when she had first seen Spike, and that had been enough to send chills down her body though his enmity had been as obvious as his beauty. What she felt now was primal, an urge that went beyond reason and well into instinct. There was nothing of feeling to it, nothing of emotion beyond the basest lust, but that lust was almost overpowering. She moaned again, as much in arousal as in pain. Spike mistook the sound for agony, and helped her to her feet to face both him and the woman for whom he had been searching for months in search of vengeance for what she had stolen.

'I told you that continents could not keep me away from you, Drusilla,' he told her, his voice polite, almost reasonable in its calmness, but cold. 'I told you that, come what may, I would find you, and I would punish you for that of which you have deprived me.'

'And I told you that there was nothing that you could do to me that I could not do to you twice over,' she replied, her face settling back into its more familiar human form, though no less frightening for it. 'Once I took the amulet, there was nothing that you could do to me. You should have given up the search.'

'We have to leave, Spike,' Buffy whispered urgently to Spike, who bent his head to hear her, so faint was her voice with both exhaustion and fear. All her instincts screamed at her to be gone before Drusilla and Quintus Eranus began to battle in earnest. It was a battle in whose crossfire she neither needed nor wanted to be. 'We have to get out of here.'

'I know, luv,' he whispered back to her, inching them towards the door, though it was still blocked by the former Roman general, towards whom Buffy tried her best not to look, lest she be overwhelmed with what she did not want to face, for it negated the effort that she had made to trace Spike across the world. The fire that burned in her side and her knee reminded her as much of that as they did of Drusilla.

The vampiress stood imperiously as she faced down a vampire whose power would have been obvious even had his identity not been known. As she and Spike inched their way across the room, attempting more with hope than expectation to stay beneath the otherwise occupied attention of the protagonists on either side of them in the small cellar, Buffy was reminded of the vampire novels that she had read in amusement, of the power that vampires were supposed to possess beyond their status as earthbound, physical beings. Of mind control, of telekinesis, of near-irresistible control over their environment, of invulnerability. Amusing, she remembered thinking, wondering what disappointment those authors would feel if they ever met a real vampire. Now, she found herself wondering if they had. Maybe they had met one like him.

'Take it, Patricius,' Drusilla crooned, majestic and unafraid. 'Come and take it back., Take your revenge, see if it will bring Helena back.' 

The rumble of his laughter echoed, the growling of a tiger in the tall grass as it stalked its prey. 'Helena is gone, Drusilla,' slowly removing his jacket and laying it carefully on the ground. The picture of an old-fashioned gentleman preparing for a duel, awaiting the order to fire, facing death for a point of honour. 'She died when you left, when you … finished with her. There was little of her left, at the end.'

'There will be less left of you,' she told him disdainfully. Her black eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, drawing in the faint light around her until she seemed, in Buffy's eyes, to stand in a pool of pure darkness, illuminated only faintly by the candles sputtering in the faint, foul wind of the door slightly open behind the Roman.

'You understand love, William, do you not?' Patricius asked Spike, turning his gaze in the direction of the lovers for the first time. Buffy almost buckled beneath the intensity of his eyes that seemed to see only her despite the object of his question, despite them looking elsewhere. She lost herself in the depths of those eyes, Spike's arms seeming an eternity away amid the silent communion of the Slayer and the Ancient.

Dragging her back from the brink of her silent capitulation, Spike's voice rang throughout the shadowed chamber with all the defiance of old, the brash impudence and the refusal to be cowed by anyone that had made a reputation unlike any other. 'Yeah, I do,' he told the Ancient. 'I've felt it, I know it. Both of the women that I've loved are in this room, and I've just betrayed one to save the other. So, yeah, I understand all sides of it. The hope and the despair, combined.'

'Don't look to that coward for help against me, Roman,' Drusilla warned her adversary. Despite her protestations of defiance, of her confidence, she seemed reluctant to strike first, as if the amulet that nestled like a dark eye over her alabaster breast was not in itself enough. 'He doesn't know what he is anymore.'

Spike rounded on her and snarled, his grip on Buffy loosening as his rage took over. 'I damn well do, Dru!' he snarled at his Sire. 'I know exactly what I am. A vampire in love with the Slayer, a traitor, a killer of his own kind. That is what I am.'

'Is it enough?' Patricius asked softly. He, too, seemed reluctant to strike. Were his speed the match of hers, he would have already been at her throat if he had the desire. 'Is it enough to be that? Or do you seek something more? Something of your old purpose back, William? Something of the real fear your name could once summon? The most audacious Master in history. That has to mean something to you.'

Despite Buffy tugging at him weakly, knowing that neither Drusilla nor Patricius could afford the distraction of dealing with them and that they could be gone if they wished, Spike hung back. 'I heard about you, Roman,' he said contemptuously. 'Heard that your offers aren't worth a sparrow's fart.' His gaze landed on Drusilla. 'And I know better than to listen to that anymore. All I want is my Slayer.' He looked at her for a moment. 'I think that she's all that I ever wanted, even a hundred years before she was born. Even before I was a vampire, I think that she's all I hoped for.'

He turned back to Drusilla as Buffy came crashing back to earth, hearing those words spoken without feeling for all the feeling that was behind them that she was sure only she could sense. She could still feel the eyes of the Roman, though she refused to meet them. That would be the worst betrayal of the heartfelt sentiment just expressed. Though she was in his arms, and dependent on him for escape, she knew in that moment that he needed her even more.

'Sorry, love,' he said to his Sire with real regret, though it was the regret of an old friend. 'I don't think that you were ever what I needed. I think that you were just keeping the bed warm.'

Without warning, Drusilla raised her arm and pointed directly at his chest.

Time seemed to slow for Buffy in that moment as she saw the energy start to build, as she saw Patricius, too, raise his arm, turning slightly. The anger that burned in the vampire queen could be felt with ever shudder of the air as it almost seemed to shrink back from the power being summoned.

The bolt of energy that flew from her hand seemed to ionise the air as it passed. It struck Spike directly in the chest, sending him flying back against the wall with such force that the old stones shattered behind him, the awful sound of that drowned out by his mindless howl of agony. He slumped against the ground, unconscious. Comatose. 

'Spike!' Buffy shouted with horror, struggling to reach him though he was yards away and would never be able to if Drusilla wanted to stop her. 

Another bolt flew, and Buffy could feel her end come with it.

Then it stopped. 

Buffy had reached Spike and, drawing in a deep breath, hefted his dead-weight with all of her remaining strength, gritting her teeth against the pain. She was able to see Patricius standing, her arm outstretched, his power having blocked that of Drusilla.

They stood facing each other, waiting for whatever would force them into combat with powers that could level the desolate capital of the forgotten Tsars.

'You don't leave, Slayer,' Drusilla told her, never taking her black eyes from Patricius. 'You wait for me.'

'No, you wait for me, you mad bitch,' came a low voice the doorway.

Jur'Khan Chung, Lord of Hordes, stood in the black of the crumbling doorway, never taking his eyes from Patricius.

'Leave, Slayer,' he told her softly. 'You've given me the Roman.'


	8. Chapter 8

                Buffy tried to lift the dead-weight  that Spike had become, but it was all that she could do to stand on her own. Her healing, though rapid, had never had to deal with the kind of massive injuries that she had been forced to sustain at the hands of Drusilla which, she reflected as she gritted her teeth and put pressure on her shattered knee, had been the point. Drusilla had been less concerned with the infliction of pain immediately than the assurance that she could inflict it indefinitely. She had learned well at the hands of Angelus. 

                'I said leave, Slayer,' Jur-Khan Chung ordered absently, all his attention fixed on Patricius and Drusilla as they stood two yards from each other. 'I keep my bargains, and you have kept yours.'

                'What do you think that I am trying to do?' she asked sarcastically, hefting Spike with one arm and biting back a scream of agony as she slipped in a pool of dirty water, putting additional pressure on her wounded left. She had made a bargain with a vampire, her mind whispered to her as the tension mounted with every slowly passing second, but she ignored the bite of conscience that told her that she had betrayed everything for which she had once stood. Bitterly, she reflected once again that it had been Angel who had forced her to do that for the first time, setting her on a road that had led to nothing but pain and suffering.

                The Mongol general jerked his head to one of his men who was standing behind, though well away from the potential battle zone, small though it was and amplified in perceived size by the sheer power that was contained within it. For a moment, the rotting cellar seemed a cavern, primordial and intimidating for what lay within it. All it was missing was primitive drawings on the sodden walls for the picture to be complete. The other vampires, powerful though they were, were lesser creatures, grotesquely inferior creatures from the three vampire Masters who stood beyond them, the distance far beyond the physical. They belonged on a different plain, and the reluctance of the forms into which they were bound to exist here could be imagined with little difficulty.

                One of them, the one that she had first seen when she had entered the war hall of Jur'Khan Chung's granite palace, lifted Spike without difficulty, helping her to her feet also, dragging them both towards the door with an eagerness that, the Slayer was sure, had little to do with any concern for their health and far more with his own. He had no place here, and he knew it.

                Patricius' voice rumbled through the chamber, though it had lost whatever semblance of grim amusement that it had once contained and was filled now only with the remorseless determination that had seen him survive millennia when most vampires fell after less than twenty years. 'She will not leave so soon' he decreed, without looking in her direction, his face assuming a mask of effortless concentration.

                Where the open door leading to the faint light of the evening had beckoned like the warming light of a home fire promising the comforts of familiarity and safety, now was replaced with a glowing blue barrier that promised torment if crossed. Buffy had now idea how she knew that crossing it meant death. She just knew that she did.

                'But, I think,' the Roman continued, 'that she should have her health for this.' He pointed at her without meeting her gaze, worried though it was, and she felt an incongruously pleasant tingle start at her feet and move its way up her body quickly. As it passed her limbs, she felt the cuts, bruises and internal damage healing as though it had never been. She gasped with the pleasure of it, for it was the closest thing to sexual release that she had felt since Spike had left Sunnydale, an eternity before.

                She was once again the Slayer. 

                As the odd feeling suffused her totally, she was unable to see the detached, analytical expression on the face of Drusilla, something that would have seemed alien before had the Slayer not seen the insanity literally melt from the face of the vampiress in front of her as the power that she had stolen had taken over, driving her with its relentless will to expand. Nor did she see the expression of fury on the face of her Oriental ally as he saw and sensed what was happening.

                All she felt was the renewed strength and power that coursed through her. Even at her peak, even when training and practising every day to defeat Glory, to use every tool in her unnatural arsenal to save the apparently doomed life of the sister that had become her whole life since the death of her mother, she had never felt as powerful as she did in that moment.

                She could challenge the Gods themselves, she was sure, resisting the urge to scream with the pure pleasure of it. Spike, prostrate beneath her and barely conscious, a ragged hole through his chest, was oblivious to the change. 

                The cellar, dark and dank though it was, entirely fitting as a place of torture and torment of indefinite promise, seemed brighter before she realised that even her eyesight had been improved. The joy _was sexual, and she whimpered with the intensity of it. Never mind that she feel parts of her wither and die, parts that she would never have sacrificed before without first dying. Parts of her that she had once died __for, parts of her that had brought her here in the first place. In their place remained the primal urge to dominate, to gather what power she could and use it as she saw fit. For who else could stop her._

                The vampires behind, the four servants of Jur'Khan Chung, drew back from her with a mixture of both horror and awe. As she ignored the awakening form of her lover beneath her, dismissing from her mind whatever foolish misconceptions had ever led her to believe that such a puny creature was ever worthy of her, she realised something, something wonderful and simple. So pure in its clarity. She, the Chosen One, the Slayer, relished their obeisance.

                And wanted more.

                The respect that she had earned and the fear that she caused among the undead legions in Sunnydale had been one thing, a function of that with which she had been born, the strength over which she had no control married to the duty that regulated it. With icy clarity, she realised the weakness that that duty had always brought out, the reluctance to take the final step necessary. The removal of the inhibitions that had bound her, the realisation of what it meant to _be_ a Slayer, now meant that so much more would be hers than a short, violent life spent protecting those who would never thank her for her efforts, efforts for which she had twice willingly sacrificed herself. Once, she laughed bitterly to herself, they had even tried to _arrest_ her for protecting them.

                Such folly.

The names washed over her in a tide of familiarity and hidden knowledge that she had never suspected that she possessed before but that she knew were linked inexplicably with the company that she was in, the power that surrounded her and the evil that arose within her, that she greeted like an old friend whose assistance she missed. With the power, came the knowledge and, with that, the awareness of what she was and what she meant.

                _Aurelius._

_                Akheneton. _

_                Thakoiris._

_                Jounn'i._

She looked down once at Spike. Seeing for the first time his weakness, she felt only contempt.

Spike began to stir, the wound in his chest healing slowly, but still unaware of the dread power that had been unleashed above him. He was ignored by the rest as a toothless insect, easily swatted if he dared to bite. Clawing his way back to consciousness, ignoring as best he could the burning pain in his chest from the wound and his side from his ribs, he pushed himself up against the wall as best he could, though it took so much energy to rise a few inches that his body threatened to betray him. Only three lifetimes of practised endurance allowed him to stay where he was, and that only with all the strength that his wounded body could muster. 

                'What the bloody hell?' he muttered to himself as he looked up, trying to understand what he was seeing.

                He had seen power before, he had tasted it himself at times and he had been in its company, had scented it, been tempted by it. But the power in this room shared between the three vampires and Buffy was like nothing that he had ever heard of, read about. It was solid, like a wall of darkness that pushed at its limits to expand beyond the confines of the tiny chamber that bordered it. He had expected Quintus Eranus to show that kind of ability, had seen it in Drusilla and shrank back from it with instinctive fear. He would have understood Jur'Khan Chung pushing the edges of it, a vampire lord who as a mortal had ridden with the Great Khan himself.

                But his Slayer was suffused with it. His lover, the woman for whom he would sacrifice a world with grim resolve to see a smile from her tanned face, stood at the centre. Above him, her head turned away, her eyes drawn to the nexus in the centre of the four of them. Beneath her, he had never felt so excluded. No small power in his own right, he understood now what it was to be mortal in the presence of the Ancients. Though Drusilla was barely older than he and Buffy but a fraction of his age, he had not felt so young since he had _been_ young. Nor had he ever felt so helpless, even when trapped in the chair to endure the manipulation of Angelus' thwarted desires. An immortal who for a century had stalked his mortal prey with the reckless abandon that had built a dark legend to be whispered by lessers as a lesson to learn, he now was but a child in the presence of teachers who, he knew, would share nothing with him.

'You betray everything,' Jur'Khan Chung spat at Patricius as Buffy tried to assimilate the limitless knowledge that had been placed at her disposal by the outstretched arm of the Roman. 'This was between us, and only us.'

                'Insignificant troll,' Drusilla snarled at him, turning her attention from the demon that hunted her across the world to the one with whom, moments before, she had shared an alliance of self-interest. Her eyes were hooded in the half light, though that itself seemed to amplified by what had arisen between the four of them. Spike tried not to shrink back, but it was instinctive. 'You know so little for one so old.'

                'This was never between just us,' Patricius told him calmly, letting his arm fall to his side as he stood with unnatural stillness as the tension melted. 'This has been building for the millennia.' 

                'And you thought to stop it because you wanted something as simple as vengeance,' Buffy told the Roman general contemptuously. 'For something so petty? How far you have fallen.'

                Patricius chuckled, though the sound was mechanical as it rumbled through the small chamber. 'No, woman, vengeance is a mask for what is far more real.' 

                'You loved Helena,' Jur'Khan Chung told him, his slanted eyes narrowed, his bulk and strength imposing as he loomed above them all in sheer physical presence. Drusilla was willowy and slight, Buffy small and seeming so weak, Patricius lean and fit. But Jur'Khan Chung was like a mountain surrounded by foothills. For all the good that it would do him, Spike knew as he pushed himself to one knee, trying his hardest not to be seen, for the attention that he would attract would make the first kiss that he and Drusilla had shared in that forgotten London alley seem like the most tender embrace that he could imagine from the Slayer above him who was being torn from him by the lure of the power that had been bestowed upon her for reasons at which Spike could only guess, despite his education and slyly acquired knowledge.

                'I loved her,' Patricius admitted. 'With everything that I could muster through two and a half millennia of existence. I watched her sleep for that time, watched her for months and years on end, praying that she would wake for a moment, praying that she would be able to look upon me with something of the awareness that I remembered.'

                'She spoke of you at the end,' Drusilla crooned to him, her malice barely hidden. 'But her voice was different. More scratchy.'

                'You I will kill,' Patricius told her, turning slowly in her direction, though keeping a watchful eye on the other two, 'for taking what was mine and making it yours so that even I cannot take it back. And for it you will suffer.'

                'As will you for what you did to me,' Jur'Khan Chung hissed at him. 

                Buffy laughed, the sound nothing like the pleasant tinkle of her normal girlish giggle. It sounded like nothing so much as the growl of an animal, the warning of a predator. Within it, Spike sensed, was contained oceans of bitterness and betrayal, though of what he did not know.

                'You speak of wrongs done you, princeling?' she asked Jur'Khan Chung, her eyes flat as she regarded him. 'It was you and your sire who bound me and mine for millennia within this endless cycle of righteousness.' She spat the last as though it defiled her to speak of it. 'It was you and yours who despoiled my Order for your own ends. And you speak of betrayal?'

Spike understood nothing of what he was hearing, nothing of the interaction of which his beloved was in undeniable part, but he understood enough of hatred to know that he had never seen so much of it in such a small place, so much that it seemed to light the room with the purity of its darkness. Hate had fuelled him before, and he understood its incomparable strength, but the hatred around  him now, he knew, had been strengthened by millennia of nourishment within the fertile minds of these ancient vampires. No creatures, he knew himself, could nurture bitterness so productively.

The pain in his chest ebbing, though he knew his heart had been pierced by whatever Drusilla had done to him, he rose to one knee, waiting. He had never felt so outmatched, but then he had been faced by more experienced opponents before and had survived. Planning and intelligence were, he knew, the best counters to brute force. And of those he had plenty.

_Buffy,_ he thought to himself as h rose just below her field of vision. She had never seemed more beautiful to him than she did at that moment, and never before had he been less attracted to her. Gone was the deceptively fragile beauty that had warmed him mere minutes before, in its place the perverted opposite of everything that he loved about her. He could feel it. For her innocence, Patricius had with whatever he had done to her substituted an ageless cynicism. Her clarity of purpose he had tainted with self-interest. And for her humanity, he had given her the soul of a demon.

_No, you stupid ponce,_ he told himself. Not given, but resurrected. He was young, but he knew the legends.  He had merely ignored them as overly elaborate campfire stories before now, before their reality was so blindingly clear in front of them that any refutation was as much worth as howling at the moon that he could not see in the depths of the cellar's darkness, surrounded on all sides by enemies that made him seem insignificant with their strength and power.

_Enough of this,_ he shook himself, and rose smoothly to his feet. Behind him he could feel Jur'Khan Chung's cubs, but he paid them no attention. They belonged even less in this company that he did.

'So,' he drawled, snapping the four of them from their preoccupation with each other, 'we've got ourselves quite a gathering here, don't we. Aurelius, Akhenaton, Jounn'I and Thoikaris. I'd wager the four Orders haven't been in the same place for, what? Three thousand years? Maybe more?'

'Stay out of this, boy,' Drusilla ordered him, imposing all of the authority that she possessed as both his Sire and the new Master of his Order. It was all that he could do not to flinch, but he suppressed the fear that he felt. 'You don't belong here.'

'Get out, Spike,' Buffy told him, and this time he did flinch. He had endured her hatred, he had endured her coldness. All of that and more he had fought through to touch her soul. But he had never before endured her apathetic contempt. The anger within him at what had been done to her rose, but he fought it down. Now was not the time for misjudgement.

He knelt and picked up his duster from where he had placed it a pillow for his lover's head, and draped it around himself. For some reason, he always felt stronger when he wore it. Irony, he thought to himself. He had never been a soldier, but he knew that the soldiers in the room would appreciate what it meant to be more comfortable in armour. He felt the bulge in his pocket, but hoped against hope that he would not have to risk using it.

'Don't think so, Slayer,' he said to her, then turned to the others, seeing how her normally lively eyes burned when being so addressed. 'But then, she's not really a Slayer any more, is she?'

He was answered by a wall of silence that matched the desire for vengeance that matched the darkness around him for intensity.

'Thought not,' he answered for himself. 'This was never about her, or Helena, whoever she is,' he ignored Patricius' stiffening, 'or our baby, was it? This was about the Order War. This was about getting it over and done with once and for all, wasn't it, general?'

'You sired this insolent child?' Jur'Khan Chung snarled at Drusilla. 

'I was bored,' Drusilla answered him. Spike stifled the hurt that he felt at the casual truth of this.

'The Order War has been too long ignored, William,' Patricius told him. 'Do you think that a creature such as I would do this merely for vengeance? Do you think that would take such a risk? I admit that I will rip your Sire limb from limb for depriving me of what was mine, but I thought that it would be better to kill two birds with one stone, to deal with everything at once. I was happy in my anonymity. It would take more than simply vengeance to rouse me from it.'

'You talk too much,' Buffy told him. 'We should get this over and done with. We have lived under the shadow of this for long enough. If it takes this puny vessel to rouse me from my sleep and have done with what was postponed by what was done to me, then I will take the chance. I, too, have a need for vengeance.'

'And you are impatient, young one,' Drusilla told her, moving back to rest against the wall. Spike, who had spent a century watching her, knew that there was something badly off about her movements, movements that were usually a bizarrely complementary mix of grace and clumsiness. There was a silkiness about the way she moved, now, a smoothness that she had never before possessed. He had known that she was different as soon as he had found her again, months before, but he had put it down to the power that she had acquired, the power for which she had to be watched. But it was beyond that, he knew. The movement of rest against the wall should have reduced the tension in the room, building with the force of a bomb that was primed to go off at the merest spark of inevitable conflict. Instead, it increased it. 

'We have been waiting for this for more than three thousand years, we can wait no longer,' Jur'Khan Chung announced.

In a flash of understanding, Spike realised what was holding them back. A four way battle was next to impossible to wage on even terms at the best of times, he knew. No sane creature would undertake one, for the outcome rested in the hands of Fate. Skill might well count for nothing, indeed could be a liability of the worst sort, for showing too much strength would lead to numbers being stacked against you as a result of the fear that the other three would feel. And the odds here were too even. 

Despite the proclaimed eagerness of Patricius, Jur'Khan Chung and his Dark Queen to have this done with, they were reluctant to start it. Only Buffy was eager,  and Spike knew why.

It brought a tear to his eye as he thought of the reason, for it was something that he had never thought would happen to her of all the beings that he had known, whose strength and fortitude had challenged the very Gods themselves, only to be undone by a feud about which she knew nothing and was of which the unwilling and unknowing inheritor. Perversely he, too, was eager, for this to be done, for every moment that it lasted dragged her further and further from him. She had told him that she loved him, that she had searched the world for him. An image of his daughter, a daughter that he would never see, flashed through his mind, igniting the fury that would make him terrifying.

But not to this company, in which he belonged as much as did a child at a Council of War. A Master himself, he was in the presence of Lords. The Hierarchy had never seemed so unyielding. The only Lord that he had met in his life apart from  Patricius was Nest, and Nest himself would have been hard put to take his place here.

_Wrong place, wrong bloody time again, Spike,_ he told himself with grim amusement. Love, it seemed, would always be his most effective enemy.

'You're waiting long enough, you Latin scum,' Spike drawled at the Roman, though he got no reaction beyond a slight narrowing of this dead eyes. He felt around in the pockets of his duster. Lighting a cigarette with one hand, he hoped that they paid no attention to his other. 'Not much of a risk taker, are you?' The wound in his chest was burning, but he determined to remain impassive. 'Never were, really. I heard that you never gave battle unless you were sure of victory, that with all the laurels that the Senate bestowed on you and the parades that you marched in behind the chained leaders of the enemies of Rome, you never took a risk in your life.' _There!_ he shouted silently as he felt the round shape in his pocket. He mentally thanked his hated grandsire for one more important lesson learned. 

Prepare for everything.

'You try my patience, child,' Jur'Khan told him, backhanding him viciously, sending him flying to the ground in a swirl of old leather and cigarette smoke. He rose to his feet, though with less grace than before, such was the pain. 'Do you think that by stalling us you will gain your Slayer back?'

'I thought that you, at least, had courage,' Spike shot back. 'That you would want to face Thoikaris in the full flush of its strength, not hostage to the body of a Slayer.'

'I'm no Slayer,' Buffy growled at him from the depths of such icy coldness that he felt a shudder rip through him. Of all his nightmares, being so addressed by her was among the worst. _Not her, mate,_ he steeled himself, though it did no good, for her didn't know if she ever would be again. 'I'm more than any Slayer.'

'Then ask yourself, why Patricius would bring you back,' he pressed her, trying his hardest to sow the seeds of doubt within her, knowing that the others were not  yet ready. 'Ask him. He knows why when you jumped from the tower to save Dawn and died,' his unbeating heart shuddered at the memory, of being unable to see her shattered corpse through the fog of tears that he could not control, 'that no new Slayer was called.' He was gratified to see her swing in the direction of the Roman. 

'Ask him why it was you to whom he could speak silently,' Spike pressed on, realised now what he connection to Patricius actually involved, and from where it came. 'Ask him why you haven't been the same since Willow brought you back. The part of you that is still Buffy is asking those questions. Haven't been totally taken over yet.'

'What does he mean?' she asked Patricius, moving towards him with unmistakeable hostility. He looked at her warily, as did the others. They weren't ready yet, Spike knew. 

_Time to strike,_ he told himself.

Knowing that they were distracted, he carefully removed the pin from the grenade in his pocket, the one weapon that he carried with him from America in case of anything, and hurled it at the wall. At the same time, he threw himself forward, crashing into Buffy and covering both himself and her with the leather of his coat, not knowing if she, too, would need its protection.

She tried to throw him off, and her newfound strength would have enabled her to do so easily. He had time to hear Drusilla scream at him, an outraged cry of affront, and the growl of Jur'Khan Chung, before the explosion ripped through the thin, rotting stone wall at the back of the cellar beside the door.

The rest was drowned out with the screams of the unprepared vampires as the cold midday Russian sun bathed the shattered cellar. 

There was only one thing worse, Spike realised as he sheltered beneath the leather of his duster, than the smell of his own charred flesh. 

It was the smell of Buffy's.


	9. Chapter 9

                _When the Gates of Fire are sealed,_

                _And the last Line falls, _

_                If the first truth is revealed,_

_                Then the Shadow calls._

_                Spike remembered the old prophecy that he had read as an undergraduate in Cambridge as he dragged the unconscious Slayer as quickly as he could through the dark labyrinth of tunnels beneath St. Petersburg. The history student that still occupied a part of him could appreciate the irony of using the old Tsarist escape tunnels to outrun the very mystical enemies, belief in the likes of which was one of the most notable features of Romanov decadence. Had they read the prophecy, he wondered to himself, pausing long enough behind a small shaft of pure white sunlight that pierced the barren darkness, assuring himself that they were not being pursued, though he knew that the other three vampire lords would not rest until the Order War had been, at last, resolved._

                He fingered the cut on his cheek gingerly, where he had been caught by a jagged shard of flying stone. The destruction that he had unleashed on the rotting lair of his former lover had been less than total, but it had been enough. Though the others in that room could have survived the brief shock of sunlight before they instinctively went for cover, he knew that so ingrained were those instincts that they were too powerful to ignore. Vampires operated during the day, yes, and he better and perforce more practised than most, but night was their time. That meant that he had at most seven hours before they each recommenced the hunt. 

                If Buffy, or whatever it was that she had become, did not restart it first.

                He knew the way to the filthy basement that he had been using, and would have been able to find it even if in the depths of the kind of agony that Drusilla had, so briefly, inflicted on his Slayer, but he was unsure about whether or not to return. Drusilla knew where it was and, though he was sure that she would be the most reluctant of the three to strike first, the inherent weakness of Aurelius as embodied in her, fighting against her nature as the Ancient heritage was, he could not rule it out, even in his increasingly rare moments of optimism. Hefting the Slayer again, who made not the slightest murmur as he carried her, barely noticing the weight, he turned south instead. 

                The room that he had so forlornly occupied in the depths of his despairing absence from the Slayer was grimy, fitting the mood in which he had found himself while vainly attempting to curb some of the more elaborate impulses of the insane vampiress that he had loved with every fibre of his being for more than a century. It was dark, lit only by candles that he fumbled with shaking hands to light. Laying the unconscious Slayer on the filthy pallet that he used as his bed when sober enough to find it, he tried to still the shaking in his hands from both the tension that he had felt and the agony in his side, taking several attempts punctuated by muffled cursing to do something so simple as light his zippo. He had taken it from the body of a dying Italian soldier in the trenches of the Great War after the disastrous rout at Caporetto in 1917, and it had seen both much use and more blood. He had used it once to fire a brothel whose madam had once refused him entry, and had treasured it ever since. As the candle spluttered into life, he doubted that he would ever include that story in his repertoire of anecdotes suitable for his Slayer.

                Turning, he grimaced with the shooting pain in his side, seeing her face, framed perfectly by her golden curls, illuminated by the poor light of the candle. He knew that she deserved better, though the faint burn mark on her face from where the sun had hit told him that she would be lucky to see such natural light again. He knew something of the legends of the Order War, knew what was required to bring about its end, and knew that a human Slayer was not part of those requirements.

                'Thoikaris,' he murmured softly as he looked at her, removing his coat slowly and tossing it carelessly into the corner, beside several empty bottles that reeked of stale vodka. He barely noticed the scent before, but now more than ever he was aware of the kind of surroundings that his girl deserved. 

                'You bloody stupid bastards,' he told the damned spirits of his forebears, the fury melting from his voice as he realised the futility of cursing the blind short-sightedness of the vampires of ages past. Still, it rankled.

                It was enough that he had been refused the validity of his affections by the naiveté of the girl on whom he had bestowed them, but it was infinitely worse that as that refusal had vanished with the pangs of long absence that their reciprocation would be torn from him by the ghosts of past conflicts which he would not himself have bothered fighting had he been alive at the time. It was enough that he had to endure the madness of his former lover and temper the insanity of her power-crazed dreams without knowing that he had been so perfectly manipulated by Drusilla to lure the Slayer here.

                A tear fell from his eye as, for the first time since he had been turned, he allowed himself to weep without restraint. The picture of his tiny, dead, daughter, a daughter that he would never see, haunted his mind. A child that he had been conceived by the grace of God, fruit of a union that His church and their tools would see erased from history if they ever got a chance. He wondered at the panoply of enemies that he had managed to accumulate over his relatively short life. Surely Patricius himself, oldest vampire yet living, had fewer than did he, one of the youngest Masters of his time.

                'Don't wake for a while, pet,' he breathed quietly, though she moved barely at all. She was still breathing, that at least was something, though he wondered whether it was reflexive on her part. Her heart, though, that was the problem. Occupied though he had been by simply trying to keep them both alive and away from the others, in agony he might have been, but he was not so focused on escape that he had missed the aching silence from her chest, where once her heart had beat in glorious defiance of all those that would have seen her dead, all of those that she had buried. 

                Hours later, hours spent in bitter struggle against the urge to seek the one form of solace that had kept him going all this time in the company of his Dark Queen, hours spent filling the small chamber with the acrid scent of cigarettes to burn the eyes of anyone foolish enough to disturb him, he watched her stir against the ropes in which he had bound her as gently as possible. He disliked visiting the reminder upon her of what Drusilla had done, but it was necessary. He knew for a fact, with an instinct that went beyond any suspicion, that she would attack him without hesitation when she did regain consciousness. The call of blood demanded it, he knew. He could feel it in his bones, with everything that he could sense, could feel the summoning that was being sent forth from the north. That he knew what it was was all that allowed him to resist it. He also knew that others across the world would not be so fortunate.

                Spike watched Buffy slowly open her eyes as she pulled unconsciously against the ropes with which he had her securely tied. It almost broke his heart to so soon remind her of the torture through which he had allowed Drusilla to put her, but he knew that even that was not enough protection. The Slayer, he was sure, did not have the strength to break through the triple layer of rope in which he had bound her, but he was almost sure that it was not his Slayer that was murmuring softly, as if awakening from an unpleasant dream. The burns on the side of her face were healing rapidly, but not so rapidly that he could not tell their origins.  He had endured such burns often enough in his time to know what it was that they represented.

                'William?' his love spoke groggily, lifting her head slowly, as though pressed by the weight of a mountain. Her golden curls fell lankly around her beautiful face, half-hiding it in the candlelight.

                'Slayer,' he said coldly, taking a cigarette and lighting it slowly, his eyes never leaving her face, though it was not this time with adoration that he watched. Rather, he scanned her with all the wariness of a deer watching a lion. He knew, this time, who was the predator and who the prey, and he disliked being on the opposite side from that to which he was accustomed.  'Fully awake yet?'

                'Not quite,' she answered in an expressionless tone that he had not heard her use since the first few hours following her unwanted resurrection at the blind hands of her alleged friends. 'But I'm getting there. Its been so long, after all.' She raised her head at last, pulling carefully against the ropes that tied her down, testing them for weaknesses.

'Buffy,' her sweet voice repeated, rolling the two syllables as though tasting them, and twisting with disgust as though her palate were offended by it. 'A perverted accident of history, Slayers. Did you know that, scion of Aurelius? Do you know the origin of your lover? Of what attracts you to her? I wonder would you have been so ardent and noble in the chase had you known.'

                'It wasn't her sweetness and light, you thieving bastard,' Spike snarled at the creature in front of him. Though he knew that it was not his Slayer who was speaking, it was difficult to see and hear her without thinking that it _was her._

                'Probably not. Still, I wonder that some small part of you does not still yearn for what you know is beyond you through the limitations of your nature. This Slayer's memories indicate that this was not the first time that your grasp exceeded you reach.'

            'Do you want me to have to beat you out?'

'You couldn't if you tried. You lack the strength and you lack the conviction. I was there when she won all of the battles that you lost, I was there when she met you first, when you lost your first fight to a Slayer. I was there when you couldn't kill her for the first time, and I was there when she first decided that she couldn't kill you. Do you seek to make me believe that you will risk that?'

                'That and more to bring her back.'

            'It will take more, it will take a miracle, and God has turned his face from this place now, to et this finally end. Your Slayer is cast into the ether, William. A life for a life, a soul for a soul. You know the rules as well as I. She cannot come back unless I let this go, and I will not. I have waited two and a half thousand years for this. You think that I will let it go because of the lovesick delusions of a child? You know me little.'

                It was the expression in her face and the last words that she used, that made him feel as though he had suffered a particularly brutal blow to his chest. Not needing breath, he had forgotten what it was like to be winded, and was not forcibly reminded.

                She cocked her head to the side in a gesture that was more reminiscent of him than it was of her. 'I see that the truth was not long in escaping you,' she observed analytically, like a naturalist observing hitherto unsuspected behaviour in the object of her study.  'Perhaps I have underestimated the last bastard remnant of a once-proud line.'

                He inhaled deeply, relishing the feel of the tar in his dead lungs, reminding him of what he was. Now, more than any other time since he had realised the depths of his feelings for his Slayer, he needed to remember.

                The first glimmer of feeling entered her face as the smoke surrounded her, a brief flicker of distaste. 'Unpleasant habit,' she observed.

                'Been out of the loop for a while, haven't you?' he drawled, though ice was crawling through his veins. 

                'Not so long that some things have not changed, some things that never will. The predictability of the weak is a constant throughout history, among our kind and humans alike. And you are weak, William the Bloody, scion of Drusilla of the line of Aurelius. Weaker than you know.'

                'Not so weak that I can't stop you from getting what you need to end this,' he shot back, tossing the cigarette aside furiously. The faint orange glow flew through the dim light in a perfect arc to his left, then slowly faded amid the detritus. 'Not that weak, and not quite that stupid. You don't have control yet, not as long as Buffy is still alive. Patricius can use all the power that he has, but she still needs to die before you gain total control. She is in there somewhere, fighting. I can feel it. I was around Angelus long enough to know what that feels like, to sense that kind of conflict.'

                She chuckled, though it was mechanical, like the attempt of a robot to simulate the sound. 'You think that I don't have the strength to keep her down?  You think that I have waited two and a half millennia for this chance to fail because of the insignificant strength of a girl barely past puberty? You underestimate me far more than I ever did you if you believe that.'

                'She doesn't know who or what you are,' Spike answered. Ordinarily, he would have tortured the demon into submission, into retreating from the pure agony that he could inflict if he so desired, but he knew that he could never do anything like that to Buffy, even to her body without her soul within it, not as long as there was a chance at her restoration. _What fools love makes of us all,_ he observed to himself darkly. It was always the worst weakness of any warrior.

                'And you flatter yourself that you do?' the demon observed contemptuously, curling Buffy's lips in a way that she would never have managed herself.

                He drew a deep breath, drawing on all his memories of the legends that he had once learned so eagerly before realising, to his present chagrin, that it was pointless to live by the moth-eaten words of a few insane prophets. Would that he had paid more attention when it was in his power.

                'Thoikaris, childe of the First, sire of the Third Order, Queen of the Night,' he declaimed, obscurely satisfied to see its eyes widen fractionally at the extent of the knowledge that it had obviously thought lost. 'Instigator and loser of the Order War, cast out by the combined efforts of Kornokalen, Patricius Quintus Eranus and Qui Ch'i. Left to rot in the ether until the end of time itself. Most powerful vampire in the history of our kind. A dark legend. If we had children, you would be in the stories told by parents to frighten them into submission.'

                This time a laugh, and a real one, but darker than any that the Slayer could have managed, deeper and more resonant. The light itself seemed to flicker through the small room, as though the candles shied away from the sound. 'Indeed,' Thoikaris observed. 'You might do well to remember what that means, child. You may be the Slayer of Slayers, the youngest Master of your generation, the most feared of your line since the death of Nest, but beside me you are but a whelp, not yet weaned from your mother's teat.'

                It was humbling to be so dismissed by one whose verdict was irrefutable, but he would not let himself be swayed by rhetoric, nor would be allow himself to be distracted. He could feel that it was yet many hours before sundown, so he knew that he still had time to finish this, to bring his Slayer back.

                'I may be all that and more,' he agreed, swallowing the pride that had seen him achieve all that Thoikaris so easily dismissed, 'but I'm still the one that has you bound and waiting for the resurgence of my Slayer. She _will_ fight back. She _will_ beat you.'

                Again, that dead laugh. 'I, who was beaten only by a coalition of the most powerful of our kind ever to grace this world? _I_, who even then was not fully defeated? I, who alone of those now existing remembers the genesis of our kind, will be defeated by a human child, a mortal, a _Slayer_?' The last was invested with such overwhelming contempt that Spike shuddered. 'You make me remember humour. It has been too long since I have laughed.'

                'Its been too long for you for anything,' he shot back. 'Your time is passed, what you are used to is long gone. Do you know anything about the world the way that it is know? The kind of creatures that have slipped through the void since you were last here? The kinds of demons that you would have to face and vanquish if you wanted any of your old power? I'm only the least of them.' He grabbed her by her hair, not forgetting who was inside but unable to resist. In a life of unceasing violence, as a means of expression and a part of his identity as much as any memory, sweet or bitter, that he held, it was all that he had to express himself. She looked at him with interest, despite the pain. If she moved a millimetre, his Slayer would lose some of her exquisite locks. 'You are finished, woman. I don't know how you got back, what Patricius did, what he meant to do or even why you would wish to return. But I know enough to know that I won't let you, that I want my Slayer back and that there is nothing that you can do to stop me if I _really_ want you out. I'm betting that in two thousand or more years you don't remember what it is like to fear something but, if you have any instincts at all left from when you last saw the stars, I will teach you to fear me.'

                Thoikaris wrenched away from him, a look of pure hatred in Buffy's green eyes replacing the contempt that had occupied them but moments before as she learned that there were at least a few things left in the world to respect. 'You think that you can force me out?' she spat, twisting Buffy's perfect voice into a vicious parody of what it was. 'You think that you have the power?'

_They heed the call from the halls of ice,_

_                They come to make the righteous weep,_

_                Thousands to die as part of the price,_

_                Of the bitter whirlwind they would reap_

                She relaxed against the ropes as she saw the struggle being waged within him as he heard the call, the summons that was nearly impossible to resist. Drusilla, though he could not hear her voice, was calling to him and all of the surviving Masters from the Order of Aurelius to come and reinforce her in preparation for the final battle that would be waged her in the city of forgotten empire. He knew the nature of the call, the primal urge to respond coming from deeper within him than he would have thought possible, and felt all the raging instincts that had served him so well over the years push and beg him to respond. The struggle could not be concealed, for it consumed all that he was. As the call went out from the Winter Palace, to the north, he stumbled back away from his Slayer and clutched his head with both hands, crashing back into the broken glass of the bottles that he had used to ease his pain, sending shards of green and clear glass everywhere in a hail of razor sharp splinters. He allowed nothing to escape his lips but a moan that he could not control.

                Not that it mattered.

                Her voice penetrated even that, so attuned were his senses to its beloved sound. 'You feel the Call, child,' she said dispassionately, as though carefully analysing the behaviour of a crazed insect. 'You cannot resist it. She is your Sire, and more than that she is the Lord of your Order.' Thought his eyes were closed and what light had flickered through the small, cluttered room had vanished when his fall had smashed the only lamp, he could sense the smile on her face as she said it, a smile that Buffy herself had never directed towards him, locked together as they had been in a vicious cycle of hate and need. 'You think that you can overcome millennia of what makes us what we are? That you can blithely disregard the call to arms for a final end to this? Powerful though you may think you are, your power pales in comparison to that.'

                It was all that he could do to force the words from his throat. There was no feeling of pain, nothing of discomfort, not yet, just the siren call of the damned, calling him to battle, beckoning with infinite lustre. He could almost feel himself being physically dragged, though he resisted. 'Then you're in trouble, bitch,' he snarled at her, rising with difficulty then stumbling back against the debris behind him. 'What's to stop me from killing you and ending one of the threats to Aurelius?'

                'Your nature, and that of the call,' she answered him imperturbably. 'You have no choice but to go to Drusilla, as all of the rest have no choice but to go to Quintus Eranus or Jur'Khan Chung. It is woven into you to obey without question.' He could hear her lip twist. 'Or initiative.'

                'Not me,' he grunted, and rose with immense difficulty. Now he could hear his Sire, as he could hear her countless times in his head for a century, though with none of the love that she had at least pretended for him, only the stern voice of immense authority. _Come to the __Winter__Palace__, come to me, obey the call of the Order. It has been written, so let it finally be done._

                'Not bloody likely, Dru,' he whispered so that even Thoikaris, oldest of the Four, could not hear.

                He pushed himself up from his crouch, doing his best to close off the irresistible voice in his mind, drawing him in. 'You are stronger than you look, child,' Thoikaris observed, without much surprise. 'The memories of your Slayer are extensive, and they do speak to your mental strength, though I would have thought that the weaknesses inherent in -'

                He cut her off with all the impatience that he had ever felt in an existence not noted by most for restraint. 'I know that you're in there, love.'

                Buffy was swimming in a sea of oblivion, trapped within the phantoms generated by both her own memories and those of the demon that had possessed her. In one moment she saw the look of naked terror on the face of her sister as she jumped from Glory's platform, in the next the fear that she felt when faced by the seemingly unlimited strength and power of the Master.

                All the memories that had plagued her dreams and her waking moments of contemplation, rare though more frequent as they may have been, were relived in such a vivid way that she may as well have been living through them again, only this time the shock and the fear were magnified tenfold by the regrets that she felt over all the failures that plagued her. The death of Jesse, so long ago and so nearly forgotten by everyone, was like an open wound. Her failure with Faith and the consequences of that, the deaths caused by her sister in blood in service to the only man to ever show her affection because of who she was and not what would have caused her to weep, if they had not been suddenly replaced by the anger and the grief that she felt when pummelling Spike in the alley behind the police station. Nothing of what was pleasant assailed her in mitigation, nothing of the love that she had felt for Angel before it was went crashing to hell, nothing of the security that she had felt with Riley, or the love that she felt for Dawn, countered the anger, terror and grief of all the worst things that had been forced upon her in her short life. All the negativity was condensed, and it pounded her.

                Alone in the darkness of her own mind, she could not even weep for what she had lost. The clear blue eyes of her stillborn daughter, the product of the insanity of the attraction she felt for Spike before the purity overcame the filth, were the only things that she could see, the only things that relieved the darkness and the pain. The only relief from the years of torment was the brief flicker of unadulterated joy that she had felt after hours of labour.

                And then it vanished, replaced the aching sadness she had felt both at the death of her daughter and the bitter knowledge that she was alive only to destroy, that she would never create.

                Alone in the darkness, she could not weep.

                Nor were her memories all of those that she suffered.

                _She was bound and gagged, tied down by both the numbers of her legions of enemies and the power that they had employed in their fear. In command of the legions of minions created only for this, stood the implacable enmity and boundless hatred of the scions of her brothers' Orders. For Akhenaton, long dead at her hand, stood Quintus Eranus, his expression watchful, cold as the grave from which he was not long sprung. For Aurelius, destroyed by his own thirst for power, stood Kornokalen, his massive arms folded over his bulk, silently directing the assault against the last of her loyal army. For Juonn'I, destroyed by the First himself  for his arrogance, stood Qui Chi, his slanted eyes bitter and angry._

_                His fury was as the candle to the blaze next to her own at the malice of what they had done to Helena, all for the delusions of love felt by the youngest of the Lords._

_                'Nothing will keep from any of you,' she snarled as she thrashed against the enchanted chains. The Druids chanted in the background , the smell of their incense almost covering the delicious scent of fear coming from the other Lords. One of the lesser vampires crashed against the wall from the strength of her kick, but it was scant satisfaction._

_                Fear was such a … delicious … feeling. It had been so long since she had last felt it. _

_                'Death will close even the heaviest door,' Kornokalen told her, his voice deep and resonant, as befitted the son of a warrior tribe, sired by Aurelius himself._

_                'Not this one,' she shot back, as a blue glow began to surround the Druids, lighting the darkness around them, so necessary for their spell, their chanting reaching a crescendo. 'Not me. With every passing of a generation, I will return. Your kind will never be safe from me.'_

_                A look passed between Kornokalen and Qui Chi, one of dark suspicion. 'All of her descendents are dead,' the Han told the German. 'The Order of Thoikaris is extinct.'_

_                'What about her human descendents?' Patricius asked from the shadows, his silver armour over red eerily reflecting the Druidic glow._

_                'They hardly matter, not as long as your lover is kept asleep,' Qui Chi told him. 'Our Orders are safe. Our kind will grow fruitful.'_

_                Thoikaris/Buffy snapped the bonds of rope that were holding her with a snarl of effort with which she lacerated her wrist. The minions drew back in instinctive horror as the greatest and oldest of their kind was loosed, the scent of her blood filling the air. It took a bare second for the other three Lords to react, Patricius drawing his _gladius _with the smooth efficiency of the trained soldier, Kornokalen and Qui Chi rushing forward. But the darkness, total as it was through the necessity of the spell was being woven, hampered them for another second. It was just enough time._

_                Thoikaris/Buffy snapped the other ropes easily, though the enchanted chains on her wrists still bound her to the effects of the spell, were it to be completed. She leapt from the crudely hewn wooden table in one bound, landing with feline grace, her legs bent. Scanning the room, she sensed the three lords to be a moment away but, more important, she sensed the Druids, could hear their chants and sense the power emanating from them. It was enough for one last throw of the dice. She grinned. And moved like lightning._

_                One of the Druids screamed as she tore out his throat, the blood splattering on the unseen wall behind. Pushing him aside as he gurgled his last breath, his hands trying in vain to stem the flow of blood, she backhanded another, snapping his neck without effort, such was her strength._

_                'Finish it!' she heard Qui Chi shout urgently at the remaining three. He could smell the blood, and feel the death of the last. 'Finish it now!'_

_                As she moved to the others, she heard their voices being raised to a feverish crescendo, the green blow from their implements illuminating the room in a sickly light. The other three lords grasped her from behind, holding her firm, though she thrashed. One of the minions tried to plunge a wooden taper through her chest, but it bounced harmlessly off. Patricius knocked the offending servant across the room with one blow that contained all of his formidable rage._

_                'Idiot!' he growled at the cowering vampire. 'If it was that simple, do you think that we would have had to go to these lengths?' He swung around to the remaining three black hooded men. 'Get this done, now!'_

_                She was able for one last moment to wrench away from the iron grip of Kornokalen, able one last time to look into the hard eyes of the Roman. 'This does not finish here,' she told him, her voice dead as, at last, she accepted the inevitability of her defeat or herself and her Order. She felt the lassitude creep over her as the last three Druids exerted every shred of power at their disposal. 'As long as some of my blood is left in this world, something of me will remain. And that will be enough to thwart every ambition that you have.'_

_                She finally slipped away, into the torment of oblivion._

                'I know you are in there somewhere, Buffy.'

                _Spike.___

                 She heard his voice from what seemed an eternity of distance away, as though she were in another plane, not merely trapped within her own body. It was scant consolation that she could still feel and sense everything that was happening to her, that she could still be aware of every aspect of her environment. For if she was not in control, there was no point.

                But there was a greater prize, as she listened to his voice. One that had been given to her unwittingly by the hubris of a vampire Queen.

                'Come on, love,' she heard him implore her, his voice as firm as ever. 'You know that you are stronger than this, stronger than her. Strong enough to chase me around the world, strong enough to defeat a God, strong enough,' his voice broke for a moment, then solidified again as though his moment of weakness was illusory, 'to bear out child and live with her death.'

                The memories of the beautiful blue eyes of their stillborn daughter blazed through her mind, giving her the strength to fight the overwhelming power of a vampire who had been ancient when Rome was an unknown village on the Tiber. She could feel the resistance of Thoikaris' will, stronger than anything she had fought, imbued with the desperation of two centuries of waiting, and wanting nothing less than complete control, unwilling to concede even a sliver to the Slayer whose body she inhabited.

                Still, Buffy fought. But, as she fought, she listened.

                'What use is your Slayer, William?' Thoikaris crooned seductively. Had Buffy be able to shudder from the recesses of her own mind, she would have, for she could never have imagined her own voice having such overtly sexual overtones. 'One girl, barely twenty, claimed by two others before she even looked at you as a suitable mate? For the price of simple acceptance of the inevitability of my triumph, you could rule beside me. I, who was sired by the First himself, I who sired the greatest of the four Orders. I, who gave birth to the Slayers themselves? King and Queen, William. Lady and Lord. You could head Aurelius yourself, you ambition is great enough for that. What better means for the attainment of the revenge you so desperately seek against all of those that have thwarted you?'

                'I never had much ambition,' Buffy heard Spike reply, but his voice was not as firm as it had been, not as hard.

                'All you have to do id what you have always wanted,' she purred at him. 'One bite, a few drops of blood. This neck, William. The neck that you have never been allowed to touch. Even now, the bite of Nest, Angelus and Dracul overshadow everything the girl claims that she feels for you. Add to it, William. Add your bite above theirs. And see the world fall at your feet.' 

                Buffy could see Spike waver, his eyes flitting back and forth from her neck to her eyes, powerfully tempted. A sadness descended on her, though it merely redoubled her resistance to the power of Thoikaris. A vampire he was, and always would be. She could offer him at most fifty more years of happiness, and even that slowly turning to bitter anguish as she aged. Thoikaris could offer him an eternity of beauty and power.

                But the Slayer would not let him make that choice for himself. She threw herself against the barriers erected by the vampiress, and for one moment, breached them.

                'Spike, don't listen to her!' she cried with her own voice, the purity of it knocking back.

                He reached forward with his hand, tentatively, as though afraid that the merest touch would send her spiralling away from him again. She was engaged within in a struggle harder than anything that she had ever fought with Thoikaris for control. She could feel the powerful vampire rage against the temporary mastery that she had been able to assert through the strength and power that had been leant to her unwittingly by Thoikaris' malice, but she knew that it would not last long. The fight was far from over.

                But she could enjoy, at least for a moment that seemed to stretch, the feather light touch of Spike's cold hand on her cheek, his eyes full of wonder.

                'Is she still in there?'

                She felt herself being wrenched away again as the vampire queen batted her defences aside.

_With timeless rage would she rise,_

_                Her exile  an error,_

_                Through  the bond of blood she dies,_

_                By the black soul's terror._

                'I'm still here, William,' she told him, pulling away from a touch that he too withdrew as though the very act of contact would sully him. 'I'm not leaving just because your petty little Slayer thinks that she can fight.'

                'She's fought better than you,' he snarled at her, his face contorting with the fury that he felt. 'Come on, Slayer. Fight it.'

                'Fight me?' she asked him with a laugh of pure malevolence. 'How can she fight me, when I am the origin of what she is? Do you know nothing of our lore? Do know nothing of from where the Slayers come? Or why she is the last?'

                'I couldn't care less,' he shouted at her, his hand drawing back to hit before he remembered who it was he would be damaging, and not knowing in his frustration who it was he would be hurting. 'Do you think that its because she's the Slayer that I love her? Christ, I barely remember anymore what she is. I only care about _who_ she is.'

                Deep within, Buffy heard the words, and they gave her strength.

                Thoikaris was ancient, and powerful, fortified by almost three thousand years in the mist, by the implacable determination for revenge and victory that had seen her through such a long time without seeming hope of seeing the world again with anything more than the slightest part of her power being passed around whenever a new Chosen One was called. The vampire queen had depths to her that Buffy could not begin to plumb, with reserves of strength so steeped in evil that the darkness was spreading its tendrils throughout her soul. And she was right. Their time together, albeit through the cold calculation of Partricius Quintus Eranus in thwarted revenge for the loss of his love of three millennia to Drusilla's malice, had taught Buffy from where it was the origin of her power had come. And why when she had died for the second time no new Slayer had been called. That knowledge should have crippled her, sending her wailing back to the oblivion that welcomed her like a lover whose ministrations were too long missed.

                But another lover beckoned her, and it was to him that she chose to go.

                Thoikaris' defences against her reared up like a black wall that stretched form ground to sky, from horizon to horizon, a barrier of pure force and power. Were she a soldier, Buffy would want all the artillery in the world to tear a hole in that wall and reassert control. But she was not. So, instead, she used the only force available to her, its source in the pure fury that she felt at what had been done to her, at the chances lost through her own hubris and arrogance, at the opportunities for happiness that she had let drift away through her mindless aggression in the darkness of a forgotten alley behind a police station.

                And at the consequences of having the father of her stillborn child located half a world away while she was forced to bear the pain of it alone.

                Again and again she battered at Thoikaris' defences, ramming into the wall in her mind with all the power and force that she could muster. Again and again, it threw her back, but she would not stop, not now. She was dimly aware of Spike's voice in the endless distance, but she could spare no concentration to listen to him. Nor could her enemy, so he was left talking only to the body of his love, while she struggled with a power that before she could only have imagined could have existed.

                It bent, once, bulging inwards under the force of her assault. Pushed back, she tried again, summoning all of the memories that she could to give her extra strength.

                Thoikaris, too, raged, but she was bearing the brunt of an attack that she could never have anticipated.

                Again, it buckled. Again, it was repaired.

                _There._ A breach. _Once more, dear friends._ She remembered the last time that she had heard a quotation from that most quotable of Shakespeare's works. And that, too, leant her strength.

                She forced herself through the breach, battering aside all of the force that her primeval ancestor could muster. It was like wading though a marsh, but she did it, beckoned by the light beyond.

                She felt Thoikaris slip away, back to the void from which she had been summoned. _I will not be defeated so easily,_ were the last words that Buffy heard before she almost fell back into control of her own body, tied securely to the wall of a filthy room.

                The tears slipped from her eyes as she Spike, looking at her, his head cocked to the side.

                'Buffy?' he asked, his voice breaking.

                It was then, for the first time, that she realised the cost of her triumph. And what a cost it was, the realisation of a fear that she had, as a child, held to be worse than all others before life taught her what fear actually was.

                She felt Spike's cold touch, and knew that her skin was equally cold.


	10. Chapter 10

P.S Before I start, it has recently occurred to me that I don't mind if anyone else posts this story on their sights or recommendations, or anything. Just tell me, 'cos I would like to see it in cool fonts. Mark it as a WIP, though, because updates are few and far between.

Dietrich Vost stepped away from the corpse in front of him, regarding the twin wounds on her neck, made with perfect precision as a surgeon would analysing his most recent success. He wiped a drop from his chin and licked it, closing his eyes against the ecstasy of it, the purity.

It was night in Hamburg, a pure night so cold that he breathed to see the mist form in front of him in a brief white cloud before it dissipated in the cool breeze. He looked up at the pale moon above, regarding it with eyes that were equally pale, almost white. His black formal suit clashed with his pale blonde hair, cut short in the manner of the SS that he had helped to found for his amusement. Behind him waited two of his minions, fledglings not of his making who had crossed the Atlantic to learn from a true Master what it was to be what they were, for few there were in the New World who remembered.

A brief shudder coursed through him as he thought of his Sire of three hundred years before. Surely Lord Patricius had not crossed the great expanse of the ocean, for he would have heard.

And, at that moment, he heard something else, and with it a feeling that ripped through his consciousness like the blade that he had once wielded with such power and elegance that had titillated the decadent nobility of his day with skill that they could not master. It was a Call, something unlike anything that he had ever felt, drawing him to the East.

He pulled his long heavy coat around him, and gave the pair behind him brief orders to summon his jet. Then he turned, and stared in the direction of the rising sun, five hours away. His eyes reflected the urgency of what he felt, and he ached to move.

Hatukani stopped, her razor sharp sword paused in mid-swing behind her head, her practice interrupted in a way that she would never have expected. The mortals in front of her, for whom she was demonstrating the ancient ways of the samurai from whose caste she had been drawn by Lord Qui'chi, so many years before, waited for a moment, then began to whisper among themselves, wondering what had stopped her. 

They did not wonder long, for it only took her moments to dispatch them. Cleaning the pristine blade on the expensive suit of one of them whose name she could not recall and for whom a large family on the outskirts of the ancient Imperial capital of Kyoto would soon begin to grieve in the classical Japanese manner, she sheathed the blade behind her back, her face impassive. 

She looked to the west as the call of her Order went forth.

Angel woke suddenly from a deep sleep, thrusting upwards from the bed in the dark with an sucked breath that left him feeling drained. He threw aside the silk covers, and stepped towards the window, the same one through which he had crashed having consummated his twisted love of his Sire, years before. The soul that had anchored him and his actions for the past century melted away as chaff on the wind, as though it had never existed and, for the first time in four years, the demon took full control, for no human soul could compete with the primal summoning for the final end to the war that had been left for far too long.

Angelus grinned, turning to the east, anticipating the battle to come, from his extensive knowledge of vampire lore knowing that all the Masters of the Three Orders were being summoned for one, final, battle. He knew nothing of the fourth.

But the prison guards whose throats were ripped from them in bloody sprays that horrified even the hardened criminals over whom they had charged were the first to see the glory of Thoikaris reborn as a former Slayer stepped out into the night, not bothering to turn in any direction, gleeful at finally having escaped her prison. She was sure that the Slayer whose soul she had crushed with so much more ease than she had experienced in the body of the other would have hated the thought of freedom so soon after her voluntary penance for such petty crimes as torture and murder, but the Vampire Queen knew that three thousand years and more of captivity were enough to pay for her crimes. Now, it was the turn of others.

She turned her head towards the evening sun, closing her eyes. And she, too, sent forth a call. It would not be long now before these children learned the folly of opposition to the will of one of the First Four.

Jur'Khan Chung belted his scabbard to his belt, welcoming it as one might an old friend. It had been so long since he had fought with a sword, preferring the endless ingenuity of the mortals that surrounded him for the invention of better weaponry. But he had been among the best in the Golden Horde in his day, before he was turned, and it had been four centuries later that he had finally relinquished the blade that had been given to him as a prize by the great Batu Khan himself, a reward for his valour. It had been that achievement that had first brought him to the attention of his Sire, Qui'chi, and it was fitting that he would use it to cement the dominion of Jounn'i. For that would be outcome of this battle, he was sure. He could feel the replies of the seven Masters of his line, their unspoken assurance that they would heed his call for the final battle, and would glory with him in the power that they would gain from knowing that, when it ended, there would be nothing left to oppose them. He smiled grimly at the prospect. Dominion had been too long denied him by the very existence of the others. Now, he would make the earth tremble, and the mortals cower as he achieved the destiny of his race. Too long, they had cowered in the shadows, content to let the scepticism of the humans be their best weapon. After this, they would have others yet more potent.

'Lord, you leave yourself vulnerable,' one of his servants pointed out, watching as the Mongol armed himself, stretching into the armour that he had not worn for almost five centuries, perfectly though he had caused it to be maintained. Overhead, the paintings of the greatest warlords of history, including one of the Great Khan himself, stared down. With approval, he knew. Ambition, he had learned, was a constant among the great. 'There are many weapons from which to choose.' The younger vampire, barely fifty years of age, swept his arm over the arsenal. Guns, both ancient and modern, hung side by side with every sword the endless imagination of Man could dream up; katana's hung side by side with rapiers, scimitars with broadswords. 

He shook his head, though he knew that the younger creature would not understand. 'The Order War has been coming for three millennia,' he told his servant, his dark eyes making the youth quail before him, though he had yet to show any malice. 'And its conduct is governed by the taking of mighty oaths that bind even our kind. The blades alone will decide. And it has not been for nothing that I have wasted endless hours in practice, waiting for this day. They will be blades of grass before me, and I and our Order alone will stand when the dust settles.' He smiled grimly at the pun. _And Patricius will pay for Julia Erenia,_ he thought, relishing the moment when he would hear the Roman beg for his life. And more, the moment when he would end it.

'This will not do,' Patricius told his underling calmly. A Master of no small means himself, Vost stood in awe of the sheer power of his Sire, though he knew that he and the others that were coming to reinforce the order of battle would be necessary for the ending of this. He knew the lore as well as any who had lived since before the time of Luther, and he knew that only one order could emerge from this, the rest falling to the dust which God himself had decreed would be the fate of everything that lived, and everything that died. After five centuries, still he had yet to destroy the last remnant of the pious priest that he had been, and he no longer wished to, for it gave him strength. 'Five more have heeded the call, and that will be enough, I think, but we lack arms, and we lack unity of command.'

Vost was surprised. 'None deny your authority, Lord,' he told his Sire. 'None has the power, nor the will. And swords are easy to obtain, for we inhabit the Old World, not the charmless sophistication of the New.'

The Roman smiled, then frowned as, once more, the pain of Helena's loss burned his dark soul, shadowed by three thousand years and more of bloody havoc. He thought again of Drusilla, and the exquisite pain through which he would put her, for years if necessary, once he and his had dealt with Jur'Khan Chung and his pitiful legions, and the even less significant threat of Thoikaris. What use would she be while she battled the soul of a Slayer who had twice denied the siren song of mortal death? He would forego the dominion granted by victory for a century, just to hear the bitch scream with perpetual agony. He had endless patience. 

'None has the power,' he agreed with his second, 'or the will. But this will be first time that we seven will have been together in one place, the first time that all the Orders will gather in one place since the exile of Thoikaris. My power alone will not be enough to guarantee unity in the face of that. There must be more.' He patted the hilt of the shortsword that he wore at his side, in memory of the mortal legions that he had commanded to continuous victory against the barbarian hordes of Carthage. It would lead him to victory again. And more, to revenge.

'We must ensure that we are ready, then,' Vost told him, with respect but no deference. For he, too, knew what victory would mean, the final victory for the Order of Akhenaton.

Drusilla, her power reinforced by the amulet she absently fondled as it lay between her breasts, sending shivers of power through her in a flood of near ecstasy, regretted every moment of the insanity to which she had been subjected for so long as she stood in the deserted cellar of the Winter Palace. The clarity that she had envied in others for the century and a half of her existence was hers again, more lucid than she had ever been before she had stepped fatefully into the confessional that Angelus had chosen for his amusement. Though she could think now, her mind was like a blade that had been left out in the rain for too long. She had been scrubbing the rust from the corners of her consciousness for months now, in preparation for what she had put in motion when she had crept into the pristine crypt maintained by Quintus Eranus, but still a few specks remained. And that for which she was preparing now needed every shred of sanity that she could summon. Patricius had cleverly neutered the potential power of Thoikaris by driving her into the body of the more powerful of the two Slayers the night before, and it was fitting that Buffy Summers should suffer the eternal damnation of her soul at the hands of the most powerful of the race that had ever lived, for it was to her that the Slayers owed their lives, such as they were, but that still left Jounn'i and Akhenaton, meaning the forces of Jur'Khan Chung and Quintus Eranus. Against which she could summon the foretold seven Masters of the Order of Aurelius, but she idly wondered whether or not her leadership would be enough.

The sword that she sharpened lovingly was an original, a sabre of eighteenth century vintage, and with it she knew in her unbeating heart that with it she would conquer, and rule, but it would be a close run thing. 

'Dru, Dru, what has my little girl gone and done now?' came a deep, sarcastic voice from behind her. A year ago, she would have been ecstatic to hear it, now all she felt was irritation. _Time Angelus learned the virtue of obedience, _ she thought to herself. The others would be coming soon, and they would have to learn who was the Lord of the Order, and that could only be her.

She turned, her dark eyes meeting those of here Sire and , for the first time, her inferior. He stepped back slightly from the power in those eyes, but he had forgotten what they could so as he found himself drawn towards them, the human soul buried deep within wailing in anguish.

'Come to Mummy, my little angel,' she crooned, and prepared for some maternal discipline.

Buffy wept, cold tears falling slowly from her cheeks onto the floor, to mingle with the filthy water of the cellar the likes of which, she knew, would be all that she would ever know again for the rest of eternity. 

Thoikaris was gone, thankfully, though Buffy was certain of her return in some form, for such will as could sustain survival for millennia in oblivion would not be so easily thwarted. Buffy found that she missed the Vampire Queen, perverse though it was, for without her there was a hole in her mind where she knew something should have been, something that had vanished as soon as she had felt the first flow of power from the deadly hand of the Lord of Akhenaton. It would be so simple if she could simply describe whatever it was as her humanity, but she knew that it was not so simple. It was hope, the last whiff of it dragged from her. Consigned by the inheritance of a three thousand year old feud, she was damned to spend the rest of her life in the moonlit darkness, the sun her enemy where so long it had been her most important ally. No more. That fight was no longer hers.

She lay in Spike's arms. He said nothing to her, for there were no words of comfort that could ever be adequate. He stroked her hair, occasionally, as though refusing to believe that she was actually there. She was though, she knew. This could be no dream, for no dream of hers could ever be so terrifying. Even the worst nightmares she had had when she was a child, of nameless terrors that chased her through the labyrinth of her fears, before she was chosen and knew that the world contained still worse horrors, could compare to this. This was every waking dread come to life. And all because of love,

That the twisted irony of all this. 'I know you feel something, Slayer,' he had told her a year before. And she had not, then, though it had not taken long for him to worm his way into her affections with loyalty and devotion the likes of which she could never have expected from anyone. Nor had it taken them long to consummate what he had felt, and what she was coming to feel, though she would never admit it. The result of that had been barren and dead, but the purity of the intention that lay behind it was enough. And for that she had left friends and family behind in search of its realisation.

For that, she could never return.

She tried to dry her tears, but more came. She could not control them. She smiled bitterly at the naivete that she had once shown when she had said that vampires were incapable of feeling. She knew, now, that the opposite prevailed. She could feel no demon within her, calling for her soul, but she could feel a strength of rage married to despair that no shallow mortal mind could ever appreciate. At the back of it, she could feel the love that she bore for the man who held her, magnified a hundred times by the strength of immortal anticipation.

'I love you, Spike,' she murmured through her sobs, her head hard against his motionless chest, her hand on his waist. She could never have really admitted that when she was mortal, but the strength of her feeling then was as nothing to what she felt now. It was that alone that could sustain her through what she knew imagined would be an eternity of bitterness at her fate.

'Love you, too, Slayer,' he told her, caressing her cheek, wiping away the tears as though his touch alone would be enough to console her, enough to drive away the reasons for her weeping.

She took a breath and pulled away, sitting up and looking him in the eye. It was dark, but her eyes were enhanced as never before, she could see every imperfection in the skin of his face. Not that there were many. She had always appreciated his beauty, she thought before, but now she knew her error. She could never have really done so before now.

'Slayer?' she breathed, fixing him with her eyes. She took his hand and held it to her breast. 'Does this feel like the heart of a Slayer?'

He knew, of course, what she meant, but he answered the question. 'I mightn't beat, Buffy,' he told her, 'but its still yours. Not hers, not a demon's, no one's but yours. And you are still the Slayer. Until the day you finally die, that will always be you. And that will always be what I love.'

She had dried her tears, but they well up again with the purity of his sincerity. It had taken so long for her to admit that she returned the feelings that he had with anything like the intensity with which he felt them, intensity that had burned its way through all the barriers that she had erected, that had battered aside every objection and that had, in the end, achieved that for which it burned. That it had come months too late to prevent this from happening was a tragedy for which she could berate herself for centuries to come, for this was a fate that she would never wish, but she remembered the words that had been spoken to her by Patricius, whose primal attraction she could still feel, fighting the feelings that she felt for Spike.

'What was it like? he asked her, gently pulling her upright and wiping away a cold tear from her newly-pale face. In that moment, he had never before felt so attracted to her. He had never considered bringing about what had happened to her himself, because he had known that it would destroy the very thing that he loved about her, leaving her but the shell of what he had desired, animated something that he would loath, but for this if nothing else he was grateful for the maliice of Drusilla in killing the beloved of Patricius and bringing about the termination of the Order War, that this could be the result. He could still feel the summons of his Sire, beckoning him, and he knew that he would not have been able to resist without Buffy as his anchor to something new, something that was not tainted by what he was. His love for her was like a primal rush, greater a thousand fold than anything he had ever felt for Drusilla even when his love for her had been at its peak, when the world itself was but a pale backdrop for the all-consuming devotion that he had felt for his Dark Queen. That anything could transcend that was something that he would never before have been able to believe, but it had.

She took his had away and rose with a feline grace that she would never have been able to muster as a mortal, that sent a shiver of pure desire through him as he watched. Walking to the small and filthy window, she stopped, staring out as the last rays of the sun fell below the horizon, bathing the decrepit city once again in its darkness, a darkness that portended the final end to a war that had demanded its termination millennia before. From fighting her own quiet war every night for years, she knew that war was a living, breathing thing, that had its own demands and its own needs, that twisted those who fought it into parodies of what they were. In her case, this was now the literal truth, but she remembered when she had been in college that she had understood at an instinctive level, beyond the shallow intellectual analysis that had so distracted the others around her, what had allowed the German people seventy years before to commit the acts that they did in the service of the worst evil ever to come from the minds of men, in service of Hitler's demented view of the world, actions that had led to the starving citizens of this very city being trapped within for more than two years of siege, battered relentlessly day and night by the artillery of the Führer's _Wehrmacht._

'It was strange,' she told him, her voice quiet. 'I never thought that I would ever become pregnant. When I was younger, and I thought of having children, playing with them in the sunlight, on the grass, it was like I was thinking about someone else's life, you know? Like watching a film that you know isn't real. Whenever I tried, it just didn't work as an image. I mean, there was never any reason that I knew of that I couldn't. I got my period every month the same as every other girl, but it just never seemed as though it would happen.

'The others freaked, though.' Her voice lowered to that of an emotional whisper as she fell back into the halls of reminiscence. 'There was no morning sickness or anything. I just woke up one morning and I _knew._ That was all it was. I knew. I checked up, same as anyone else would, but I knew before the tests were completed that I was pregnant, and that it was yours.'

He watched her, silently, knowing that there was nothing that he could say.

'The last guy that I had been with was Riley, and even on the Hellmouth you can't have a pregnancy that's delayed by a year and a half just because its not convenient for you to have a child while you're taking on a Hell God. I knew that it was yours. That was what scared the others, especially Xander. Its strange, you know. It wasn't that I was pregnant that scared him, I think he was happy for me. It wasn't even that I was pregnant by a vampire, It was that I was pregnant by _you,_'

She turned back, the last sunrise that she would ever witness over behind her, the darkness beginning to encroach. He stared up at her from his seat, his expression wary of what else she would say.

'I never really understood how much he hated you, Spike,' she continued, her welcoming green eyes locked on his glacial blue. 'I knew that he did, but never how much. It took Angel to bring him around, to show him what real hatred was.'

Spike uncoiled like a serpent from his position and crossed the small space between them with the hard intent of a predator. She would have been frightened, had she not ever felt so secure as she did with him now, knowing now what she had become.

'And what was it that my beloved grandsire had to say?' His lip twisted with the bitterness that he felt, one that time would never erase.

She sighed, slumping her shoulders, a lock of her lank hair falling in front her face as she sat beside him. 'I'm not going to go into it, Spike. Eventually, I told him to get out and never come back.

'But it hurt. It hurt even more when she … died. When I went through all that for nothing.' Her heart twisted with the memories, the horrified expressions on the faces of her friends in the delivery room, the sweat bathing her face as the lights burned through her, the sad looks of the doctors as one of them put his hand gently on her forehead and broke the news. She got one look at her daughter's beautiful clear blue eyes, and that was all. 

The tears came again unbidden, and again there was nothing that he could do to make it better, nothing that he could say that would take away the intensity of the pain that she would feel, magnified by the strength of vampire emotion, for as long as she lived, until time itself stood still, so determined was he that, now that he had her, more of her than he could ever have hoped for, that she would live until the stars themselves burned out, until God Himself in his infinite vengeance decided that he had had enough of his worst ever mistake.

She felt his hand on her shoulder again, and reached across to grasp it with her own. Contact was enough, for the moment, though he would never be able to understand what it was through which she was gong through the reliving of memories that she had buried for months beneath the single minded desire to find him again. That she had received more, and endured more, than she could ever have expected, was secondary. She remembered telling him that vampires couldn't feel. In this, she had been right. The strength of vampire emotion was more than she had ever expected, a rush of primal magnification of shallow mortal feeling that would have overwhelmed a human. She had loved him before, she knew, but it had been nothing to this, this all-encompassing need.

_He lived with this very feeling for more than a year without any signal from me that I would ever feel anything for him, and knowing that, whatever could ever be reasonably expected, that I would never be able to return the depth of what he felt with anything more than a pale shadow of the emotions of which he was capable. Knowing that I would die quickly, knowing that he was allowing himself an eternity of grief to match a brief moment of love, and still he would not leave._

For the first time, perhaps ever, she understood why he had not left before what she had done, and even then why he planned to return as soon as he could before fate itself had taken a hand in a separation that was as necessary for her as it was for him. For, she knew, had he been there when she had discovered that she was pregnant, had he been there when their daughter was born, and had he been there when she had died, she would have hated him with all that she was for being the cause of such heartache, because he would have been such an easy target. _Absence makes the heart grow fonder._ It seemed such a stupid saying when she had first heard it, but now she understood its truth.

She took a reflexive breath that she needed no more than she needed food, ever again, and turned. She looked directly into his eyes, seeing not the false empathy that she had seen on the faces of her friends who could never have understood, or the righteous arrogance that she had seen on the face of her first lover when he had found out. On Spike's face, all she saw was the care and attention that he knew was all he could give her, that he knew would all that she would need from him, five months since the wound had first opened. 

She marvelled again at how he knew exactly what she needed, when she needed it.

She took his hand in hers, his strength as ever matching her own, and felt with her cold skin the coldness of his, saw in his glacial blue eyes the mirror of her determination and strength and, placing her other hand on his chest, felt … nothing. Any more than she would ever feel again anything beat within her own chest though, she knew, her heart was no more dead than his. As he had told her, as she remembered as they shared a moment of pure clarity and unspoken understanding that he had never thought that she would be able to share with another living soul, her heart may no longer beat but, like his, it was not dead.

'I love you, Spike,' she told him, her voice soft though, to him, it lit up the darkness in which he had lived for months. 'I think I loved you long before I even met you.'

'That's the difference between us, Buffy,' he told her, lifting his own hand to stroke her cheek gently, his face a mask of wondrous awe at the preternatural softness of her newly cold flesh. 'I _know_ that I loved you, a century before you were even born.'

Their lips met in the sealing of an alliance that would shatter the world with its intensity.


	11. Chapter 11

P.S Probably a bit late now, but these characters are not mine. If they were, I would use them differently.

Buffy pulled away from Spike's embrace reluctantly. Where once her heart would have been beating so rapidly that she would have been barely able to contain it, and her breath coming so quickly that she thought that she might faint, now all the feeling that she had was in the rush of immortality-enhanced emotion, that more than made up for it. 

Their kiss has been like nothing that they had ever shared, even in the depths of Drusilla's lair, after the torture to which she had been subjected. There was nothing of urgent intensity that had characterised the uncountable times that their lips had met before, but underlying it now was, rather, the endless patience of the knowledge that eternity lay ahead to savour such feelings. It was a heady feeling, that she could enjoy this for all of time itself. Becoming a vampire had been her worst nightmare since before she had even been called, but now she felt the lure of it, the irresistible seduction though, she knew, had it happened any other way, even had Spike sired her himself, she would no longer be who she was. Immortality, she thought, was too seductive for mortals to deny.

He still held her hand in his, reluctant to let her go now that she was this close, and this much of all that he had hoped. The memory of Elizabeth, she knew, would always be fresh, and the pain always there, but she had endless moments in which to allow it to dull, and she knew that as long as his touch would relieve the worst of her introspection, it would become tolerable with time.

He twitched and, though it was almost pitch dark, her enhanced vision caught it. She could see everything in the darkness, more than she could ever have seen before in the light. She almost laughed as she saw the brief flicker of movement cross his face, so incongruous did it seem.

'What is it?'

He looked at her for a long moment, relishing the sight and the _feel_ of her, then sighed and turned away, relinquishing her hand. She felt emptier, immediately, and suppressed a shudder.

'The Call,' he whispered to her in a low voice. 'It summons me, demanding that I go north, to the Winter Palace, to end this. As one of the Masters of Aurelius, its almost more than I can resist. Without you …' He left it unsaid.

'Why don't I feel it? Not that she was overly worried about its absence.

His brief laugh lit up the darkness, so long had it been since she had heard it. 'You are the first of whom I have ever heard that was outside the Hierarchy. There is none to summon you.'

'The Hierarchy?' she asked, thoroughly confused. A lifetime spent fighting vampires, and she found that, before joining their ranks, she had known less about them now then she had known then, when everything was comfortably divided into black and white, night and day, sunlight and shadow.

He ran his hand through his hair. How to explain knowledge that should have been instinctive?

'The First, the original vampire, no one knows who he was or what his name was, other than his four immediate offspring, and three of them are dead. Thoikaris,' Buffy shuddered at the memory of her tormentor, and the ageless malevolence of the vampire queen, 'is the only one left of those, if you coming back hasn't banished her forever.'

'And?'

'Damn it, love, you should know this without having to ask!' he said to her in exasperation. 'Its woven into the fabric of the knowledge of the most impotent fledgling.' He took a needless breath, and continued. 'When the First died, no one now remembers how, his power was split into four, between his four offspring. Aurelius, who was originally an Etruscan prince, Akhenaton, who was Egyptian, Jounn'I, who was from what would now be called Tibet, and Thoikaris, who was a Babylonian noblewoman. This is all about four thousand years ago, right?' She nodded.

He continued. 'His power was huge, but even divided into four it was still immense. So, the original four figured that if they could be the last standing, all the power would devolve to them. Thus, the start of the Order War. All of the original four sired minions, and other Masters, and they fought with an intensity that would make the Mongol irruption seem tame. The war lasted centuries, though it was mostly hidden from mortals. 

'Eventually, Thoikaris, who was the eldest of the four and who was, by the way, the only one of them who had children before she was Sired, was able to take out the other three. What she didn't realise, what none of them realised, was that she would have to annihilate _all_ the offspring of the others before the power could devolve to her as the most powerful of the last Order left standing. So she went about doing that, very methodically.'

Buffy listened to his voice, and the story that was telling, with rapt attention, as much for the sound of him as what he was saying, fascinating though it was. 

'The heads of the other Orders weren't able to stop her, so they allied with each other to take her out, knowing that they would never be powerful enough to stop her on their own, and knowing too that none of them was powerful enough to expunge the other orders. As long as that held, then the Order War could be held in abeyance, and they fought only for survival. The head of Jounn'I at that point was Qui'chi , who later sired Julia Erenia who, incidentally, was the Sire of your friend Jur'Khan Chung. The head of Akhenaton, even then, was Patricius. And the head of Aurelius was Nest's Sire, Cornokalen. They went after all the Masters and minions of Thoikaris, and took them down, eventually cornering her in Athens, near the Parthenon.

'The trapped her, and would have killed her but, as long as she had offspring, she could not be killed. The problem was that Patricius had fallen in love with one of her Masters, a female called Helena, who was a Corinthian princess originally.'

Buffy shuddered with the memory of the shared communion with the Master of Akhenaton, the attraction for whom she could still feel, eating away at her like a canker, and the love that he bore his mate.

'So they struck a deal. She was put to sleep in a diamond chamber, frozen in time, outside the law of nature. Still alive, she was beyond the power of the Orders, and would stay that way until Patricius thought that he would be able to revive her without danger to his Order, or the others. That actually shouldn't have worked, but somehow it did. So, they used magic to unlock the protection wards around Thoikaris, and killed her. But they forgot something.'

He paused, reflecting. 'The vampire offspring of Thoikaris were all dead, but her human descendants were legion, after the passage of a thousand years. So, they cast her into the ether, but she was still linked to the world through the call of her mortal blood.'

Buffy listened with mounting horror at the implications of what he was saying, but remained silent, waiting to hear it, knowing what he would say but, at the same time, sustaining what was left of her innocence in the last few moments before he said it.

'In the last moments before she was cast out,' he continued, his voice subdued, 'she vowed vengeance on all of them, that she would return and claim the power than was hers but, until then, she would see all of them suffer. At the hands of her children, Buffy. At the hands of her legion of offspring. Thousands of them, at that stage.

'Mostly girls, it turned out.'

'Slayers,' she breathed, the horror suffusing her at finally, shockingly, knowing what she was, even though it was no longer her.

'Yeah,' he confirmed, meeting her eyes. 'Slayers. One chosen in every generation, to fight the darkness, to kill the vampires, to thin the herds of the creatures of the night. The revenge of Thoikaris,' he added. 'The bitch always was vindictive. Every generation, a little bit of her that was left crept into the soul of another innocent girl of her own blood, giving them strength, the urge to kill the demons. What better revenge could she have had? She couldn't have the power, but she could assure that they would not be able to claim it, either, not as long as there were Slayers.

'Probably would have stayed that way, until … Until Nest, really. Until that day over the Hellmouth.'

She remembered, the terror and the resignation, the knowledge that she would that night meet her fate at the hands of the creature that was fated to kill her.

_'I'm only sixteen, Giles.'_

She remembered the wonder that she felt when she had awoken, Xander looming over her with despair in his eyes, Angel behind him with the bitter knowledge that he had failed again. She remembered the joy that she felt, knowing even then that she still had to go on and defeat him, but the pure, primal joy at knowing that the prophecy could be cheated.

And now nothing of it was pure. Nothing of the memory that had given her strength through some of her darkest moments, the knowledge that nothing was foreordained and that her destiny was her own, was sullied by knowing what it was that had made her unique. Nothing more than the malevolent revenge of a three thousand year old vampire too tenacious to slip away.

'What happened then?' she asked, her voice more dead than even the day when she escaped it.

He moved to take her hand, but she shrugged it away, lost in her thoughts, not seeing that his face revealed nothing less of the horror that she felt, though he felt horror at knowing what _she_ was feeling and that, once again, there was nothing that he could do, nothing that he could say other than to end the story, in preparation for the endgame.

'When you died for the first time, another Slayer was called. The black one, the one that I –'

'Kendra, her name was Kendra,' she told him, remembering with fondness the girl whose flame burned far too briefly, pinched out by Drusilla on the orders of Angelus. The same day that she and Spike … The same day that she first realised that he was different.

'Yeah, Kendra,' he said softly, introspectively. 'Funny how all the names run together after a while. Live a century or more, names just don't seem to matter as much any more.' His voice was lost for moment in the avalanche of faces that he had seen in his long life. Some were laughing, some were frowning, some were staring.

Most were screaming for their lives, knelt in futile supplication.

'When she was called, and you were still around, Thoikaris started to move, though she was still trapped. More of her slipped through when Kendra died and the next one was called, more than any human could handle, more of he spirit and more of her malice, more of the hatred that alone sustained her. No young girl, no one at all who was mortal, could handle that. So, the new one, Faith … changed.

'She was always different,' Buffy whispered, staring at the floor, filthy from years of neglect.

'She couldn't help but be, different and more ruthless, more concerned with power than she ever was with its use. I wasn't there at the time, remember, but I heard about it later.'

Buffy raised her head. 'But … I put her into a coma, and I think she's still in prison. How could Thoikaris get out just because of that? Not just because … because of this.' She gestured to herself, and what she had become.

He grunted, and reached behind the bed for a small hip flask. Unscrewing the top with a shaking hand so pale that it was luminescent in the darkness. Taking a long swallow, he offered it to her. Not remembering her reaction the last time he had offered her the same flask, she took it without demur, relishing the warmth of the liquid as it flowed down a throat that was reconfigured for something altogether different.

'There's another story,' he told her. 'Remember I told you about the vampire of Thoikaris' line that Patricius loved? The one that he kept asleep for all those long centuries?'

She nodded dumbly. 'Helena,' she replied, seeing an image of a beautiful woman flash through her mind, though it was gone so quickly that she would have thought that it was a mirage, if she did not by now know better.

'Well, when you …' He took an unneeded breath. 'When you jumped from the tower, during the days that you were gone, the other sliver of Thoikaris' essence, the part that was in you, couldn't go anywhere, went to her. She woke, luv. She moved for the first time in three millennia. She wouldn't have noticed it, she was almost as bad herself, but it went out of you. Remember how you felt so empty when you came back?' She nodded. 'That was why. Nothing of what had made you a Slayer was there any more except the strength, nothing of the drive to kill, the duty that you felt. That's why you felt the way you did, why we …' He left the rest unsaid. 'I know that you thought it was because you were ripped from where you were, but you would have recovered much more quickly, otherwise.'

'And Helena?'

He sighed. 'There's the other half of the story. Patricius obtained an artifact, the Charm of Ba'Quavar, designed to make a vampire more powerful than any. He got it so Helena would be able to stay with him, come what may. But Drusilla stole it, and killed Helena before she was able to recover. It made her powerful, though. She was powerful enough already, but not enough to head the Order of Aurelius. I was next in line, actually, but I never wanted it. Rituals and stuff never were my thing,' he said bitterly, reflecting on his mistake, one whose consequences he could never have imagined when he had sent that obnoxious child hurtling upwards into the fatal rays of the morning sun.

'He realised, then, that he could do it all at one go. Take his revenge on Drusilla, and finally end the Order War. Dru was powerful enough to supersede both myself and even Angelus, if he ever came back. Jur'Khan Chung was always there, waiting. Like a spider who knew his prey would come to him. Patricius killed his lover, Julia Erenia, centuries ago, and the two of them have been stalking each other ever since, waiting for the right moment. Now, its come. Patricius understood that with your soul being empty now, for the first time there was a descendent of Thoikaris who could serve as a perfect vessel for her return. That's why he did what he did. The Order War wouldn't mean anything unless all the players were ready, unless _all_ the four Lords were present.'

'I've been getting these flashes,' she told him, 'images, of Patricius when he was human, of his lover, his mate. Bits and pieces, really, but he was able to talk to me when … just before Drusilla did what she did to me.'

'Subtle as a serpant, is Quintus Eranus,' he replied. 'He was a general in the early days of Rome, just before the start of the First Punic War, one of their best. He even defeated Hadsrubal when he was trying to reinforce his brother across the Alps, though he was Sired the next day by Akhenaton himself. He linked you to him through Helena, though she was dead by then. Helena was the last vampire of Thoikaris' line – even the minions and fledglings were killed during the first war. He used your link to your ancestors, Thoikaris' mortal children, to speak to you when you were asleep, and I don't doubt that he's been following you since you first came here. I think that he thought that doing that would sow enough seeds of mistrust between myself and Dru that I'd kill her myself, then leadership of Aurelius would devolve to me when the last battle went down. Even without the Charm, I'm not as strong as Dru if she's sane. I would have had to assume the mantle of Aurelius' Lordship for the fight itself, and I'm no strategist or tactician.'

_'Kill all the rest, leave the Slayer for me.'_

She continued for him. 'And he probably thought that what I felt for you would confuse Thoikaris when she re-emerged within me, enough that all he would have left to deal with was Jur'Khan Chung.'

'Who is blinded by his hatred. Not a bad plan, really. All of it hinging on the twin feelings of hate and love. He was a good politician when he was mortal, too.'

He sighed again, twitching again. 'But now, we have a problem.'

She turned to him, the darkness growing behind her as even she, child of no Order, could feel the preparations commence for what was imminent in the Winter Palace of the Romanov's. _That was where the Revolution started in Russia,_ she thought to herself idly. _Fitting place for another one._ 'We have several problems,' she said dryly with her first flash of humour in what seemed like an eternity.

He set his jaw, his eyes cold, and reached behind the filthy pallet on which he had slept for months while attending his Dark Queen. With a grunt, he removed a sword.

She stepped back as the faint moonlight coming through the window reflected from its polished steel surface. It was a sabre, that much she knew, with a curved blade, sharp as a razor on one side and tapering to a needle-sharp point on the upturn. The hilt was embossed gold, with filigree carvings around the hand guard, and there were indecipherable markings carved on the polished hilt.

He threw it to her. Surprised, she bent at the hip and caught it by the hilt. It was a beautiful weapon, far more so than the crude blade that she had wielded all those years before when she had fought Angelus in the abandoned mansion.

She stiffened when he withdrew another blade, this one a _katana_, a Japanese samurai sword, the best edged weapons ever made, of thousands of folds of sheet steel, lovingly crafted by Japanese artisans, with a straight blade and plain hilt. The beauty was in the construction itself, not the decoration that frequently adorned European swords like the one she held.

'That sword you're holding is Drusilla's,' he told her. She looked at it, wondering how many lives had been ended by it. 'She was going to use it at the final battle.' He saw her confusion. 'It will be fought with swords, that has been laid down for millennia.' He held his own straight in front of his face, as though saluting her with chivalric honour. 'This is mine. This is what I was going to use. As one of the seven Masters to Aurelius, my job would have been to protect Dru while the others tried to get to her. If she falls, if any of the Lords fall, then their lines die with them. All of them, throughout the world. So, in order for us to live, they have to live.' He pointed to her with his blade. 'You're the problem, luv. You are outside the hierarchy, bound to no Lord, not Thoikaris, not Patricius, because you weren't Sired, you were made.'

'So, no matter what happens, I'll live, no matter who triumphs,' she realised.

'Exactly, pet. But, knowing you, I know that you'll try to take out the winner, to ensure that vampires no longer plague the night. You might well be able to, too. Whoever wins will be more powerful than any vampire since the First, but they will be weakened by the battle, and they might fall. If its Patricius, and it probably will be, then you can take him down. So too with Jur'Khan Chung. I can't deny the Call for much longer, my love. If its either of them, I'll already be dead. But, if its Dru …' He left the rest unsaid.

'Then you die with her,' she whispered in horror.

'That's the price of love, pet,' he told he bitterly, knowing just what a price it was. 'You can leave Drusilla alive, knowing that she will be one of the most powerful creatures to walk this earth, free to remake it in her own twisted image, or you can kill her. And kill me with her, because even if I could refuse the call, which I can't, I would still die even if I were a thousand miles away. Just like all the others outside the hierarchy who will crumble to dust without knowing why when the Lord of their Order falls.'

She grasped his hand, strongly enough to hurt him, drawing him close. He came forward reluctantly into the faint light, his alabaster skin seeming even more pale than normal with the thought of what lay ahead. 'I followed you around the world, Spike,' she told him fiercely, the love for him that she had denied for so long burning deep within her. She could almost feel it, physically, now.

_'If my heart could beat, it would break my chest.'_

'Natural law, my love,' he told her sadly, brushing a hair away from her beautiful green eyes that were moist with tears that she suppressed with supreme effort. 'No way around it.'

She touched his chest, looking up at him. He was not much taller than she, but at that moment, she felt small, like she was a child again, contemplating the death of her parents for the first time in the way that all children do. 'I followed you around the world, Spike,' she told him, her voice breaking. 'You were the father of my child. With ten times the strength now than when I loved when I was mortal, and that was with more intensity than I ever thought that I could ever feel. I _won't_ see you die, not when we're this close, not after all of this.'

Their swords touched with a soft metallic ring, the steel between them like a wall as they drew closer to each other. His hands were on her face, his touch worshipful. Hers were on his, their eyes locked, though they drew no closer.

The time was at hand, she knew. The Call that she could not feel, she knew beckoned him like a siren song, irresistible. She knew that he had been able to fight it off for so long already because of her, but she knew that he would not last much longer before it became impossible to stay, before the final battle would commence, one that could end in two ways.

But for her, only one ending. Even if she was no longer the Slayer, even if she had not been for months before she had been turned, she still could not allow Drusilla to live if she emerged victorious. 

For her, only one ending. Her love would die.

When she had killed Angel, sending him crashing into eternity for the folly of Angelus, she had said her goodbyes weeks before it had happened. Now, she had barely moments. And short moments they were.

They did not kiss, it would have made the sorrow at losing what they had only recently found all the worse.

They parted, the feeling of his touch slowly withdrawing almost more than she could bear as the tears overcame her control. 'I love you, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' he told her, his voice controlled and deep, resigned. 'I always have and, come what may, I always will.' Saluting her with his sword one last time, he put on his coat, almost ritualistically, like a knight arming himself, and turned to leave, the leather billowing behind him.

'I love you, Spike,' she whispered.

_Love._

It hit her in a shock of realisation that vied within her for the sudden surge of joy that she felt. So intense was it that it took her a moment to compose herself. He was almost out of the door, his shoulders set squarely to encounter what he thought would be the last night of his life.

_Helena, my love_. That was why she felt what did for Patricius. It wasn't attraction at all, she finally understood. It was her mind trying to reveal to her what it was he had been trying to tell her, all along.

'Spike!' she shouted at him as he was about to leave.

He squared his shoulders and turned, unprepared for the shock of contact as she ran into his arms.

'Thoikaris was dead, right?' she asked him, the words spilling over themselves in her eagerness. 'She was dead for all those years that she was banished. I mean, for practical purposes, she was dead.'

'Yeah, she was, luv,' he told her, trying to pull away though she would not let him, trying to end this quickly.

'You said that when the Lord of an Order falls under the strictures of the war, all the others fall with them, right?'

'Yes.'

'Then how was Helena left alive?' she asked with desperate urgency. Seeing his face puzzled at where she was going, she rushed ahead. 'She should have fallen when her Lord was killed.'

'I know,' he told her, trying to look away, but she caught his face and forced his eyes to meet hers. 'I could never figure that part out.'

'She changed Orders, Spike,' she told him, _willing_ him to understand.

He was silent for a moment as the wind blew in from the open door behind him. 'You can't change Orders, my love,' he told her. 'It can't be done.'

'He _mated_ with her, William,' she told him, using his given name, hoping that he would realise what she knew to be true. 'That was how they did it. Helena had to be put to sleep for Thoikaris to die, because she had the blood of her Sire, but she _no longer of her Order._' She brought his lips crashing down on her own, relishing the feel of him, though he was too stunned to respond. Her tears, now of joy, touched his face, and he pulled back.

'Vampires can mate, right?' she asked, her voice quick. 'There's some sort of ritual, isn't there? Some sort of ceremony?' She almost threw back into the room when he twitched again with the lure of Drusilla's call, but controlled herself.

'We drink from each other's right wrists,' he told her, trying to combat the primal urge to obey the summons. 'Then we kiss, the blood mingles in the mouth, and we each swallow half. Never done it, mind you. Drusilla never would,' he added bitterly 'Said it would stop the stars speaking to her.'

Ignoring his long held anger, she continued with mounting excitement 'One has to be dominant, right? One of the two has to control it, and the other submit?'

'So I've been told,' he confirmed, then stopped, his eyes burning with what she was saying as he finally realised.

She pulled away from him, and raised her right wrist. Before she could do anything, he grabbed it. 'You're sure, Buffy?'

She nodded and, for the first time, her face changed, the ridges becoming prominent. She could feel her teeth lengthening, and knew that her eyes were yellow. She closed them, and took a breath.

The pain of her teeth ripping into the soft skin of her wrist was exquisite. She opened her eyes, and saw that his face had also shifted. However, he made no move to raise his wrist.

'Spike?' she asked him, her voice deeper and more guttural now.

'That's how dominance is decided,' he told her. You bite yourself, and give me your blood. I don't bite you, I just drink.'

He shrugged off his coat, and raised his wrist, turning it so that it faced her mouth. She had never felt anything like this before, the animal urgency that had towards him. It was like nothing that they had shared before, nothing like the sex that they had shared, primal though that had been. This was that, magnified a hundred fold by a ritual that was older than civilisation itself.

He bent, and took her wrist to his mouth. She could feel him drinking from her, could feel the blood flowing from her, and it was so exquisite that she almost buckled.

Taking a breath, sliding his pale, smooth wrist along her face, all the time her yellow eyes never leaving his of the same colour, she opened her mouth, and bit down.

She almost fainted with the rush of pleasure that was more than any human could ever experience. Even at his best, before, he could _never_ have made her feel like this.

They slid to the floor together, their eyes locked as they drank. Slowly, he pulled away, and she did the same, though it almost caused her pain to do so. The feeling of the blood running down her throat …

He moved closer, and she leant into him. Their mouths, full of each other's blood, met.

She groaned from deep within as the blood mingled, some of it dripping from her chin onto her chest. Even when she had surrendered her innocence to Angel, she had never felt closer to another being in her life, could never have imagined that such closeness was possible.

Their tongues vied with each other through the blood that they had taken from each other, their eyes finally closed, their bodies intertwined, though both were still fully dressed. 

She swallowed, the blood coursing through her, and arched with the pleasure of it as he did the same.

An age passed. She finally opened her eyes, again green, seeing the blue of his.

'Do you still feel the Call?' she asked, brushing his face as she lay beside him.

'No,' he told her softly.


	12. Chapter 12

One Voice.  
Let it be Written.  
One Power.  
Let it be Done.  
One Order.  
Let it be Finished.  
  
The cavern stank of the stale stench of death long gone. The mouldering corpses of the unknown and unnamed victims of the purges following Lenin's bloody accession to power watched unseeing the age old drama that unfolded before them. Bits of rags fell away from scraps of bone as the wind, never before seen in this foundation cave beneath the Winter Palace, blew coldly through, coming from nowhere, and ending nowhere. That the Order War had begun three millennia before, far to the south, in the midst of a civilisation that thrived on the backs of the spoils of war, of the looting of nations and the death of thousands, made no difference to the call of Fate.  
Jounn'I was the first to arrive, Jur'Khan Chung, general of the Golden Horde, follower of Batu Khan, the despoiler of Kiev, flanked by the three most powerful Masters of his Order. Lord of the Third Order, his bulk imposing and his slanted black eyes holding the endless promise of malice and pain, he walked with the implacable purpose of a creature certain of victory. He had never been defeated, not from the first moment that he had struggled through the earth to rise before his beloved Sire, Julia Erenia, the second Lord of Jounn'I. She had been killed three centuries later, by the cold hand of the vampire that emerged from the darkness, opposite. The Mongol's black eyes burned with hatred as he beheld his nemesis once again.  
Patricius Quintus Eranus stalked with the feline grace of the two and a half thousand year old predator that he was, followed proudly by his three, made in his image and no less imposing. Not as large as Jur'Khan Chung, and dressed impeccably in black silk and dark grey shirt, he was one who had rode at the head of the invincible legions of Rome, in the days of the Republic, when the Eternal City had taken its first tentative steps towards the hegemony of Empire. Lord of the Second Order, he had been the scion of one of the great senatorial families of the Republic, a general at nineteen, victor of a score of battles against the Carthaginians. The follower Scipio Africanus himself, he had basked in the glory of his mentor. For two and a half thousand years he had occupied the thoughts of the Masters of the other orders, the only one left who had been present for the original war, one of those who had bound Thoikaris. He reached the centre circle, a newly emerged ring of fire in the centre of the cave, and waited, staring expressionlessly at the Lord of Jounn'I. As Jur'Khan Chung wanted revenge as badly as he wanted the power with which he would achieve it, so did the Roman.  
The object of his fevered hatred came silkily through the third opening in the cavern that loomed over them all, waiting for its prophesised purpose to be fulfilled. Drusilla, resplendent in black and crimson, her skin ivory white against the darkness around her she, too, was flanked, but by only two of three Masters of her depleted line. Aurelius had once been the strongest of the Orders, but the mighty had fallen. Angelus guarded her with the dedication that had never been his primary characteristic, his smirk buried beneath a mask of concentration, his bulk imposing to any but the present company, who viewed him with contempt. That he had had a soul for so long was bad enough, but he had never claimed leadership of his Order when he could, and that in their eyes was unforgivable. Dracula followed, through reluctantly, having gone for so long without calling anyone master, and chafing at having to follow a reborn Drusilla. Never interested in the battle that was about to commence, he chafed now that being bound to take part, for fighting another's battles was anathema to the proud independence of spirit and conscience that had seen the Balkans erupt in a crimson forest of stakes, upon which had hung the rotting bodies of the infidel Turks, their screams of agony as they died music to his mortal ears even then, before had been reborn at the hands of Nest himself to serve an even greater evil than the twisted ultramontane Christianity that had been his raison d'être when he had been human. His handsome face cold, he watched the others carefully. He had met them all before, had battled with some and hunted with others, but this day all was subservient to the final end of a war that had been held in abeyance for most of recorded history. The world had moved on, the place of vampires taken by others more powerful, so their kind was treated like dogs by demons that thought themselves masters of all, but the powerful would never be ruled, choosing to die first as they would. Their kind did not change, and after today their place would be restored, the combined power of all of them vested in one, all-powerful Order.  
Drusilla could feel Spike coming, though she felt, too, his reluctance. It mattered not, to her. Once he came, he would have no choice but to follow the call of his blood. The Lords of the Orders were balanced in power, their swords by their sides. It was the others that would tip the balance and, flanked by Angelus, Scourge of Europe, and Dracula, the Impaler himself, waiting for Spike, the Slayer of Slayers, she knew that she had the advantage. Each of hers were legends in their own right, and what other Order could make such a claim?  
Jur'Khan Chung was flanked by Hatukani, Bane of the Samurai, but she was all the power that he could muster. For four centuries, she had ruled the Land of the Rising Sun like her own feudal fief, letting none others hunt but by her permission, seldom given and grudgingly. The other two, Chihiltipec and Khilthizezi, Aztec and Zulu, were lesser creatures, given to the wanton satisfaction of the enhanced urges of their natures before all else, voluptuaries both, whose sexual conquests ran to the hundreds of thousands. Drusilla's full mouth twisted into a sneer, the knowledge and contempt contained within something that she could never have summoned before the Ba'Quvar amulet had restored the sanity that had been ripped from her in the confessional. The lesser Masters of the Third Order were a shaming contrast to the ice cold aestheticism of their forebear, Jounn'I himself.  
And what of Akhenaton, she wondered idly as she felt Spike draw closer, his grudging acceptance of the call that she had put forth clear to her, as was the inevitability of his submission, and the rewards that he would earn as a result, for she had ever a weakness for her only Childe, prodigy of rebellion and brutality that he had been for so long, a credit to her even in the midst of her madness. She twitched irritably as she felt the hatred borne by Angelus for her boy come through the bond that they now shared. She would not have the outcome of the battle rendered unfavourable by the inability of her Sire to work with those whom he despised. It was that pragmatism that separated himself and Spike, she knew, and it was that pragmatism that made Spike superior to his mentor. The conquest of principle by practicality had ever marked her lover for a century, and so it should have been. For what did vampires have of principles? Hunters had no such luxury, they were for prey, able to take shelter in numbers. That was the reason, she knew, that Masters seldom hunted in groups, and then only by necessity. Predators without equal in evolution, they had evolved to be solitary. Lions to jackals.  
The Roman was flanked by Vost, his favoured offspring, the Butcher of Bavaria, he who had depopulated a province in one week of awesome carnage, hiding his activities in the searing cauldron of innocently spilt blood that had been the Thirty Years War. To Vost's left was Miya Sarim, a Moroccan Berber originally, of the same line of warriors that had taken Spain from the Christians and fought tooth and nail for five hundred years against the ruthlessness of the Spanish Reconquista, dulling the famed Toledo blades with martyred Muslim blood. To his right, Jean-Pierre de Guise-Montcalm, so called Lord of the Grave. One of the fomentors of the genocidal French Wars of Religion, it was he who had appeared like an angel to Joan of Arc and set her on her course to the flames that consumed her at the hands of the vengeful English nobility, fighting a losing war against the resurgent French who had risen as one to cast the invaders back into the stormy seas of the Channel that would, in turn, deny the ambitions of Louis XIV and Napoleon himself. Drusilla could see why an impressionable schizophrenic in fifteenth century France could have imagined him one of God's messengers. His blonde hair hung to his shoulders, his figure lean and powerful, his grace affected for so long that he could not now have done with it even had he wanted to.  
The ring of fire in the centre of the room burned brightly, the orange and yellow flames leaping and dancing to the wind that still blew through the room. In the centre were four swords, each of different make and design. One was a gladius, the sword that in the hands of Rome had conquered an Empire, and it would fall to Patricius to wield it, though it was no fencer's blade. The second was a katana, one of the finest edged weapons ever made, crafted with loving care by the blacksmiths of the samurai, carved from hundred of thousands of folds of the finest sheet steel. It waited for Jur'Khan Chung, and reflected his black eyes, even in the barely illuminated darkness. The third was a sabre, made for her, she knew, though her ultimate ancestor, Aurelius, would have scoffed that it was light enough to break at the first pass. She knew that it would not, that nothing would break any of these swords other than the final destruction of those destined to wield them. The fourth, a simple longsword, was irrelevant, everyone knew.  
'The last comes now,' Dracula whispered from behind her, his silken tones sending a chill of desire through her, though she suppressed it. There would be plenty of time later, when the world lay at the feet of Aurelius, to indulge. She turned to the third entrance to the cavern.  
All that was seen for a moment was darkness.  
Spike, William the Bloody, Slayer of Slayers, immortal legend at the tender age of one hundred and forty nine, far and away the youngest of this company of the elders of their kind but not disdained for it, strode into the chamber as though he owned it. Drusilla's eyes widened with joy as she saw him, for nothing in his manner betrayed the reluctance that she knew he had felt before he had entered, a grudging willingness that she felt at that moment transformed into grim eagerness. He had come home to her, she celebrated in the quietness of the icy depths of her mind, though she carefully kept her face impassive. Any mistake would be fatal in this company, she knew.  
The others looked at him patiently, though Hatukani's eyes narrowed with hatred, for he had denied her her prize in China a century before, killing the Slayer that she, too, had been hunting. And so brazenly, she raged behind her Lord. A pup, barely weaned from the grave, having the audacity to challenge what she had claimed! She would see him suffer for that alone, and suffer he would. She would petition the Lord to leave him alive when this ended, that he would learn the true meaning of pain at the hands of a mistress of the craft of torture, one who had had seven hundred years to perfect the art, practised on thousands, from the lowliest farmers of the rice fields to the highest Shogun. Tokugawa himself had been given to her, and how the famed warlord had screamed then, beside the corpses of the Jesuits he had ordered to be flayed for their boldness in challenging the supremacy of the Light of Heaven. She would make his fate a lover's kiss compared to what she had planned for the black clad upstart.  
No time and no patience for formalities dulled anyone's mind.  
'One Voice,' Patricius intoned as Spike took his place behind Drusilla, giving her pale, cold hand a brief squeeze on his way past to stand on the other side of Dracula from his despised grandsire.  
'Let it be written,' his three Masters whispered behind him, their faces focused on the ring of flames that rose in response through forces beyond them all. As one, they drew their swords, waiting for the ring to fall for their Lord to claim his.  
'One Power,' Jur'Khan Chung's voice shattered the sudden stillness, engendered by the knowledge that what had been begun could not but end other than the triumph of one and the deaths of the others. Come what would, most of the most powerful vampires in history would fall here this day.  
'Let it be done,' his followers whispered as their blades, too, illuminated the room with the reflected red glow of the flames that rose still higher.  
'One Order,' Drusilla crooned, enjoying the feel of the words on her tongue meaning, as they did, power in and of itself, the power that she had earned through the boldness with which she had stolen the charm that she wore in her bodice, and the eagerness with which she awaited the revenge of Patricius whom, even now, she could feel staring at her back with all the malevolence that two and a half millennia of thwarted desire alone could nourish.  
'Let it be finished,' she heard whispered from behind her.  
The primal joy that she felt was not presaged by any reaction that she had seen as she had watched both Patricius and Jur'Khan Chung in turn as they had completed their parts of the ritual, but they were both soldiers, always keeping their faces from betraying anything of what they felt for fear of provoking the ambition of a subordinate, though that was no possibility here, for the Masters were bound to give obedience to their Lords. It was a matter of blood as much as it was one of duty and honour, though honour was at best a vague concept among vampires, pack animals as they were.  
'Oh dear God,' she breathed, involuntarily, and cursed herself for it as she closed her eyes and raised her head upwards. The Master had felt like this, she was sure. She had never met him, but she could feel him within, even now, his strength and that of the Order that he had commanded for seven centuries coursing through her, enhancing her own even without the amulet at he bodice that she no longer needed. With a sharp pull, she tossed it aside. Now acknowledged Lord of her Order, she needed nothing else.  
Other than the loyalty of those behind her, and she learned in that second of divesting herself of that which she stole to earn the unending wrath of another Lord more powerful than she, that she could not count on that loyalty.  
There was a hiss of breath indrawn as Spike knelt to pick up the Charm of Ba'quvar, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it objectively. His was not the place to speak until battle commenced, though for some reason the ring of fire had yet to fall, still warding off the acquisition of the swords of power as easily as it had done before the ritual was completed.  
Drusilla turned to stare poisonously at her wayward childe. She had been tolerant of his foibles when in the depths of her madness but, lucid as she was now, she would brook no interference from him, ready as she was to instil in him the discipline that he had so long lacked.  
'Such a little thing,' he murmured, still staring at the jewel, ignoring the others who observed him as they might a new species in their midst. 'Enough to wake a vampire asleep for two and half thousand years, enough for Dru to risk what she did to get it. Enough to provoke all of this.' He looked up for the first time, taking in the mouldy tomb, the illumination of the ring of red flame in its centre. 'Such a little thing.' He dropped it, and with one swift step, crushed it beneath him.  
Drusilla did not care a great deal, for nothing could start until the swords were taken, and she had outgrown the use of the charm, but the breach of discipline alone was enough to warrant retribution, balanced as everything was on a knife edge. Taking a mental breath, she used powers that she had not possessed moments before, and lashed at him with her mind and all of the power that the ritual conferred, amplified by the mystical energy of a Sire's bond.  
He smiled without humour as her determination yielded to confusion, and then pain.  
The scream of agony that came from her lips as she felt what she had projected to him lash back against her with all the power than she had used shattered the eerie silence of the cavern. All but Patricius, who had risked the end of everything that he and others knew to have his vengeance, he who knew that she deserved far worse, and would suffer such at his hand when this ended. He would forego the power of the ages to torture her for as long as she lived, and observed her as a child might an insect impaled on a stick.  
Spike said nothing for a moment, despite the feral snarl of fury of Angelus to his left, and the malice that he could feel from Dracula to his right. He knew that they could not touch him until given permission by their Lord, and she was currently beyond conscious choice. Her howls of agony had degenerated into a barely audible groan, and she struggled to rise on shaking limbs, but was barely able to stave off collapse. Patricius watched her carefully, though a small smile flickered across his coldly handsome face.  
'More awaits you, woman,' he whispered, loudly enough for the cavern to pick up the echo and make the implacable sentiment audible to all who stood around the ring of flame, with one eye for what was happening and another to their enemies. The ritual stipulated a truce until the ring fell and the swords were drawn, but such creatures could not long remain quiescent in such company.  
Spike strode forward confidently, his duster behind him in the unnaturally warn breeze, his normally white hair reflecting red from the fire. He stopped in front of his once-beloved Sire, though made no move to attack her.  
'Confused, luv?' he asked her, his voice sardonic. She looked up at him with an expression that was part hatred, part fury, and part betrayal. ' He threw back his head and laughed. 'You can't discipline those not of your Order, Dru,' he told her, his voice becoming serious. 'Should have learned that a long time ago.'  
'You cannot abandon your Order, you insolent cur,' Dracula snarled, losing a vestige of his vaunted self-control, the same control that had seen him through centuries. 'You have no choice but obedience to the oldest law of our kind.'  
'You pompous prick,' Spike snapped back. 'You think because some hack lush of an Irishman scribbled some barely readable prose that was one step up from Varney the Vampyre you are somehow something special?'  
The members of the other Orders looked on, eager for anything that might weaken Aurelius, once the strongest of the Four, listening to Spike's voice as his taunts grew in intensity and precision.  
'Look at you, all tooled up for a Victorian dinner party,' he drawled, watching Angelus at the same time. He could see his grand-sire's anger rising. 'What happened to blending in, you dumb bastard? Our best sword is anonymity?' He leaned forward slightly. 'Ever hear that, you ponce? You look about as anonymous as a two headed pygmy.' Spike chuckled as he saw Dracula shake off he restraining hand of Drusilla as she attempted to rise weakly from the dusty floor of the ancient cavern, her pale face grey with pain. 'Losing the run of yourself there, boy,' he continued to taunt his elder. 'Defying your Lord now. Not the best way to start a war.'  
'Perhaps the best way to end one,' Patricius said calmly from the shadows as he watched Drusilla rise from the ground in her agony and rage, his face dispassionate as though he were watching an interesting experimental specimen. 'What do want, William?' he continued, flanked by Vost, de Guise-Montcalm and Serim. They, too, looked curious. He had chosen well with his children down through the centuries, he knew, always using intellect as his main criteria.  
'I want this to end,' Spike told him, his voice suddenly calm as he deliberately turned his back on the rage of his Sire and the Masters that followed her, though she was staring at the fire in the centre of the cavern, waiting for it to fall, waiting for this to be over that she might take her revenge on her Childe once and for all. The love that she once carried within her that had lit her black world like a candle in the dark was gone, replaced only by raging hatred for his betrayal. 'I want it over and done with, finally.'  
'You can have your wish if you take your place,' the Roman told him, his silken voice dead. 'I will see that your death is swift and painless.'  
'You're too kind, general,' Spike replied, nothing of sarcasm in his voice, for he knew that the offer was genuine, meant as the only favour that Patricius could bestow in his quest for the blood of Drusilla. The truth lay bare before all of them present, impatiently though they waited. There could be no switching of loyalties, not now. Not once the ritual had begun. 'But I don't think that I'm quite ready to die.'  
'Then take your place and fight for your Sire, not that it will do you any good,' Jur'Khan Chung snarled at him from his left, feeling less and less sure of himself as time passed and the fire did not dim to allow him to get to his sword. He had been sure of victory before but, for all his calculation and all his desire for revenge against the arrogant Roman who had killed his Sire, he was beginning to realise that he and his followers were badly outclassed. He knew how powerful he was, a match for any, but of his followers only Hatukani had the strength to last this day. Against the likes of Vost or the Impaler, who stood silently, waiting, the other two would be chaff on the wind. For all of their age, they were dilettantes in the business of war that stood before them today.' 'Take my place and fight for my Sire,' Spike ruminated, as though genuinely interested in the choice that lay before him, ignoring the watchful looks of the others as they waited, their patience thinning, though they could do nothing while bound by the ritual that they themselves had completed. 'Don't think so.' 'You have no choice, boy,' Drusilla told him, her face still grey with pain that it was taking all of her determination to overcome. 'Learned nothing yet, Dru?' he demanded contemptuously over his shoulder, barely bothering to look at her though he could sense her fury even without the bond that they shared. 'One thing I learned, over the years. There's always a choice.' He rounded on Angelus, a contemptuous smile on his face. He pointed. 'Learned that from the Slayer when you tried to unleash Acathla, you simpering fool. Learned it again yesterday.' A new voice rang through the cave, at once younger and still more powerful than any of them. 'You're right, my love, there's always a choice.' The faces of Jur'Khan Chung and Drusilla were pictures of both astonishment and fury as Buffy, darkly majestic in black leather pants and charcoal grey top, cut low, strode into the chamber with as much assurance as any of them could have mustered, her endless victories behind her, worn like a cloak over her beauty. Patricius simply smiled. So much for Thoikaris, he thought to himself. I have instead created an Order. The two of them met by the ring of fire that slowly dimmed as the former Slayer turned vampire queen took her place in the crucible of war. None there could mistake the link between them, or the glorious ease with which they complemented each other, immortals waiting for eternity to unfold in front of them with an abandon that the others here, stultified by endless age and the uncaring unfolding of years of jaded amusement, could match. Dead creatures, full of the joy of living as their lips met in a passionate embrace that all but ignored the deadly company around them, and the malice of the ages directed towards them from all points of the compass as they kissed. 'My loyalty is no longer yours to command, Drusilla,' Spike said, using her full name for the last time. 'It belongs to another.' 'You mated,' Jur'Khan Chung breathed in mounting horror as his plans were reduced to ashes by the introduction of a variable that he could never have anticipated, but which followed closely an axiom that he realised now he should have remembered. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Patricius looked on with interest. Caring nothing for the power that would come with victory in the Order War, meaning nothing to him as it did without Helena with whom to share it, he cared only about the revenge that would soon be his. He had thought that by regenerating Thoikaris from the oblivion into which he had been instrumental in casting her that he would remove William the Bloody from the equation, fatally weakening Aurelius and thus Drusilla, knowing too that Thoikaris' hatred was reserved for the descendants of Cornokalen more than it was for him. What had transpired was even better. Now, the Order War might well never be won. He could still have his revenge, and he would not have to contend with the myriad labours that would take a millennium as Lord of all vampires on earth. 'You cannot hope to win the Order War, girl,' Jur'Khan Chung continued as Drusilla took time to recover from her worst nightmare come to life, Angelus behind her looking even more shocked. Dracula was merely interested. Like Patricius, he cared nothing for the power that would come if his Lord won, and was irritated that she had seen fit to restart something that would have been better left buried. 'Whatever has happened, you are not of the Four.' 'I don't want to win it,' she told him sweetly, but her voice was deeper, more serious and more grave than it had been before, her hands, still brown from the sun that she would never again enjoy, entwined in the pale hands of her lover. 'I just want to make sure that you don't. The amount of power that would be gained her is beyond anything that anyone should ever have.' 'We transcend those limitations, Slayer,' Patricius spoke for the first time. He would not brook interference, though the slip of a girl to whom he spoke resembled her ancestor, his Helena, the only human offspring of Thoikaris that was also a vampire, so much that his unbeating heart almost broke when he saw her. But nothing would prevent his vengeance - not her, and nor her impudent lover, whatever the obvious depths of the feeling that they shared. 'You might,' she acknowledged, watching Drusilla carefully, knowing that the first threat would come from there, seeing the vampiress inch towards the flickering embers of the dying ring of fire above which Buffy stood, in which the Swords of Power were barely any longer trapped. None was meant for her, she knew instinctively and from what Spike had explained to her. She would be able to wield none of them, for she was of no Order but her own. But she was still the Slayer, and was far from defenceless. 'But these others do not.' She moved closer to him, relinquishing Spike's cold hand with a pang that was quickly buried in the resolution that she felt. She had one shot to get through to the ancient Roman in front of her, to the only creature in the room capable of wielding the power of the One Order while at the same time wanting none of it. 'I can help you,' she whispered to him as the others watched her. She could see the conflict within him being waged with all the intensity with which the coming war would be fought. He wanted vengeance against Drusilla for taking away the only reason that his sanity had been able to weather two and a half thousand years alone, and he needed the power that the winning of the war would bring to do it. But she could also see the pain within him that was made worse by both her presence and her proximity, by showing him what it was he was missing. He yearned for death, she knew. She remembered the look from the mirror into which she had glanced after the birth of her and Spike's daughter, the sheer inability to see what it was she had for which to go on living. She had Spike, she knew now. But he had nothing but vengeance, and it was cold comfort, even for one such as him, whose emotions had been leeched away by two millennia of savagery. 'You won't interfere,' Jur'Khan Chung told her, though his voice was near to breaking. His worst fear was come to life. Not only would the help of the Slayer and her lover tip the balance irrevocably towards the hated Roman, but it would mean his certain death. From being Buffy, Spike smiled at him, coldly. He should have been intimidated by the likes of the Mongol, or Vost, or Hatukani, but she showed nothing of it. 'So sure, are you, you Mongol pig?' he drawled. He cocked his head towards his lover, though he warily watched Drusilla, who by now had recovered and was quivering with the same rage and nervousness that filled Jur'Khan Chung. 'You should know better than anyone here that there are no rules but those made by the strong. Your Great Khan rewrote the rules of war and conquered the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. You think that he would have done that he played by the rules? Using the winter to invade Russia, the frozen rivers as roads for his cavalry? And you say that there are rules?' Spike chuckled, though the sound was without mirth and incongruous in the deadly gravity of the conflict barely held for the moment in abeyance as the cold wind blew through the cavern. 'You would, I suppose, flanked by the likes of those you brought here.' Jur'Khan Chung literally quivered with rage as his weakness was laid bare in front of those to whom the slightest sign of weakness would be enough to guarantee his death, and worse, for he knew that his death would not be slow in coming if he failed here today. He had played for the highest stakes imaginable, with his life and those of his followers, all for revenge, but the tools that he had brought were fragile things, and easily broken. 'Do not speak so of the Great Khan, child. What are you but the product of an effete society which blundered into empire through the mistakes of the French and the Dutch? What pride do you derive from that?'  
  
'None,' Spike answered, keeping a sharp eye on Drusilla, though she was not moving. She was, however, watching him rather than Buffy, who was speaking quietly to Quintus Eranus. All he had to do was keep the other two distracted long enough for his queen to get through to the Roman. It was a brilliant plan that she had had, planning being an aspect of her that he had not expected ever to see, and now it was laid bare in darkness beneath the ancient home of the Tsars, illuminated only by a circle of unnatural flame. 'What pride should I have in it? What difference would it make if I did? You think we are here to prove the lessons of human history? I think you've misjudged your purpose.' The Slayer of Slayers smirked at the furious Mongol, though he could feel too well the rage of Aurelius behind him, begging to be unleashed; and, for all his power, he would last but a few seconds against Drusilla, Angelus and Dracula together. He relied on surprise and unpredictability to build his legend, but there were no longer any surprises. Not here, and not now. 'We waste time,' Drusilla proclaimed in a crystal clear voice that wrenched at Spike's heart, for he had laboured a century to restore her to some level of lucidity that now she had reached without him. He was long over his love for her, but it had lasted two world wars, and it was not something easily banished from his mind. 'This is something with which we should have done, without this interference.' His eyes locked on Spike's, promising an eternity of agony, Jur'Khan Chung's gaze flickered to Drusilla, and he nodded slightly, once. Both Lords then looked to Quintus Eranus, and there their eyes widened with horror. Spike laughed mirthlessly, and strode the length of the cavern, dodging nimbly a flickering flame in the circle of fire that guarded the swords that promised an end to three millennia of cold war in one rush of heat. With the love of his life, whose live he was sure would last the eternity that beckoned temptingly for both of them like the promise of a siren's kiss, he took his place with Vost, de Guise Montcalm, and Serim, as the circle of flame that guarded the swords that alone could end all of this flickered and died. The legions of Quintus Eranus, five legends in their own right, stood watching the others with triumph foreordained. 


	13. Chapter 13

Night fell with instant blackness over the grey buildings of St. Petersburg, fully three hours before the sun was supposed to fall that night. The darkness was pervasive and almost palpable, and even those who used the strong vodka of the Russians to escape the harsh reality of capitalism and the free market felt through their intoxication, sobering up if only for a moment to sense that to which they should never have been subjected outside their darkest dreams. There was no light; this was no natural night, the very stars themselves obscured by thick clouds that blanketed the sky, rolling and flashing with blue light. Thunder clapped with instant noise that just as quickly fell to silence, to be interrupted again when next it shattered the odd peace that descended on the city, as though it was waiting. The older residents, those who had survived Stalin's paranoia and the advance of the _mafiya_ remembered the terrifying blasts of the German guns; they had laid siege to the city for two years, never getting through but destroying much of it with the terrifying efficiency of their vaunted .75s. They remembered the long nights, shivering beneath the ruins of stately homes that even the Communists in the full fury of their twisted modernism had left alone in a pride of the achievement of Russian culture; they remembered scavenging in the ruins for rats which constituted a feast for one more day of terror that the Germans might finally through, and do to them what they had done to so many of their compatriots. Few had doubted the scale of intended German vengeance that would be wreaked on a target that had so long thwarted them with the full defiance of the Motherland, the _rodina._ But the city had held. 

Those who remembered were not so certain now as they had been then that the city would weather whatever had now been inflicted on it. The city founded by Peter the Great as a window to the Baltic could now see nothing but darkness; even the sea to the north seemed black, a moving pit of tar that extended to a horizon that had become invisible. The ground did not shake as it had sixty years before with the impact of the German shells, but some imagined that it was. 

Far beneath, two hundred metres beneath the surface, beneath the tunnels that had been hewn during the dark days of the siege when only the caverns over which the city had been built had provided protection from the German artillery and bombers, another war was unfolding, one that was more limited but even more vicious.

The circle of flame had fallen, but none moved; none wished to yield the advantage of commitment. Akhenaton was in prime position, with Aurelius and Jounn'I eyeing each other and their enemies with equal parts loathing and fear. The darkness of the cavern was illuminated with flickering flame that danced red shadows on the dusty, unused walls of black and brown stone. The eyes of the vampires glowed red in the firelight, staring at one another with implacable animosity that went beyond the mere desire for power.

Quintus Eranus' face was dark, the light casting shadows on his impossibly handsome face, the angular lines of his pureblood Roman features seeming the chiselled stone of a classical sculpture. His grey eyes watched the others carefully, with the military assessment of threat which had not left him after two and a half thousand years of stalking single prey.

Drusilla returned his stare, aware that she was his primary target, her assessment of her own strength and that of her order ripped to shreds by Spike's ingenious treachery.

Jur'Khan Chung watched the others, knowing full well the weakness of his order, but his eyes were drawn to the Roman who had killed his Sire with all the ease that they had all here dispatched hundreds of thousand of mortals screaming into the darkness, some without knowing what had happened to them. 

Spike and Buffy stood side by side behind Patricius, between Vost and de Guise-Montcalm, just in front of Serim. The addition to the ranks of Akhenaton should have created jealousy and animosity in the other Masters, but they knew full well that this was not a struggle that could be won without risks, and the one which their ancient Sire had taken might be well worth the cost of leaving the two children alive. Children was what Buffy and Spike were in this gathering, beside the concentrated evil of the others, those who had prowled through the pages of history leaving little but tears of terror and grief in their wake.

The tension was more than a mortal could bear, but the only mortals cowered hundreds of metres above, frightened of the dark.

'Let us have done with this,' Patricius said at length, his perfectly modulated voice shattering the still silence, his eyes on the _gladius_.

'Let it be done,' Jur'Khan Chung replied and, with a glance in the direction of Drusilla, he turned and marched, his followers behind him, to stand by her side, his Masters standing with Dracula and Angelus.

Seven against six.

Buffy knew that it was his only chance, the only chance of either Jounn'I or Aurelius, was to fight together against Akhenaton, for individually they were outnumbered with addition of Buffy and Spike. She could feel his cold hand in hers, colder, and she squeezed it. She looked at him, and smiled, though her other hand tightened on the hilt of the sword which she carried into the last battle which she would fight as a Slayer. He had been with her through all of it, and he would stand by her side, protecting her life at the cost of his own if it came to that, she knew, though she knew little of what she would do if he fell and she did not. Die, she supposed, for she could face eternity only with him at her side.

Patricius smiled, and behind him Vost snorted his contempt. Akhenaton had been the most powerful of the Orders for more than a millennium; its Lord had chosen wisely with his offspring. Could the others, even Angelus or Dracula, creators of their own legends face the likes of the Bavarian Butcher, who had fanned the flames of religious hatred when the Hapsburgs had made their last play for power? Or de Guise-Montcalm, who provoked a demented girl to raise the siege of Orléans? Or Serim, who provoked the destruction of Tunis? Or The Slayer of Slayers, enhanced by his love for the most powerful Slayer to ever live, still imbued as she was with the power of Thoikaris, one of the First Four? They had nothing now but numbers, and numbers were fickle. 

The Roman walked forward as the other Lords watched carefully, and leaned down over the dying flames to grasp the hilt of a sword, hundreds of thousands of which had built an empire at the bloody hands of the legions. Withdrawing it from the rock, he lifted it with practised skill that had not left him. It glowed black for a moment, then faded.

As one, Jur'Khan Chung and Drusilla, too, moved forward, though they watched each other no less carefully than they did Patricius, who had fallen back to the ranks of his own to stand at their head, as he once had his legion to battle the hardened mercenary hordes of Hannibal, and the Carthaginians who had ravaged Italy before they themselves were destroyed at Zama.

Drusilla raised her sabre, which glowed the same black as did the Roman _gladius_ and the _katana _ of Jur'Khan Chung. They were ready, they knew. 

The longsword of Thoikaris stood alone, its heavy blade and razor steel gleaming silver in the faint light. There was no heir to the fallen Order to wield it, for all of Quintus Eranus' calculation.

Buffy looked to Spike, and he leant down, their cold lips meeting in a kiss of vampire passion to the likes of which she could never have experienced as a mortal, and endless more which to could look forward if she survived this day. The kiss was pure light and darkness, the call for blood mingling with the call for passion, the natural impulse of the warriors that they were. 

The battle began, to end the war.

Drusilla launched herself at Serim, withdrawing a dagger from within the folds of her black dress that made her beautiful in the dark as Angelus and Dracula took Vost and de Guise-Montcalm. The Moroccan fell back, buying time with space, though she was outmatched; for all that she was a powerful Master, she was not a Lord, and Drusilla was more powerful than any in the history of her Order since Cornokalen had fallen. She moved like quicksilver, her sabre flashing silver in the light, matched time and again in desperate defence by the scimitar of Akhenaton's scion. Serim knew that she was fighting for her life and that of her Sire, but she had fought worse than Drusilla in her time and managed to survive for more than a thousand years, and she would live yet. The dagger carried by Drusilla made her doubly dangerous but, for all her power, she was barely a hundred and fifty years old, her enemy five times that, with ten times more experience.

Patricius took Jur'Khan Chung directly, knowing that he was all that the Mongol would see through his rage-blinded black eyes that had seen the Golden Horde reduce Russia to a quivering mass of peasants frightened of the dark and what it would bring, the hoofbeats of the steppes ponies who had conquered an empire under the banner of Temujin, the Lord of the World. His _katana_ should have been a superior weapon to the shortsword of the Roman, but the _gladius_ was wielded by a Lord who had survived two and a half thousand years of warfare and dominance, and he was more than a match for the Mongol, who wanted only his death. If only the slant-eyed bastard had realised by Julia Erenia had had to die, Patricius reflected coldly as he fought for both life and death, though he would not allow himself the indignity of dying at the hands of one like this, his inferior in every aspect of the dark craft into which they had been born. Jur'Khan Chung fought with the fury that his vengeance demanded; his opponent fought with ice of a passionless existence since the death of Helena, hoping only that Serim would hold Drusilla off long enough that he could have done with the Lord of Jounn'I and turn to deal with the avaricious killer of his lover.

The cavern was filled with the imminence of the finality of mortality, as it was by the sounds of clashing steel, and the grunts of the warriors within it, while those above cowered in darkness.

Buffy and Spike, outside the Hierarchy now yet choosing to fight within it, fought Chihiltipec and Khilthizezi with an ease that they would not have expected, their swords carving dazzling arcs of shining steel in the darkness in which they could see perfectly. None had yet called forth the extra strength of their demons; they fought as humans, though humans could never have matched this deadly grace. 

Jur'Khan Chung had been right in his assessment of the strength of his Masters; with the exception of Hatukani, who fought the unnaturally skilled de Guise-Montcalm beside Angelus, who was no swordsman, none of the three who fought under the banner of Jounn'I were strong enough for this kind of battle. Against humans they were invincible; against a vampire of Spike's precocity and lust for battle Khilthizezi was a child for all his five hundred years, and against the most powerful Slayer in the annals, made worse by the power of Thoikaris, Chihiltipec had no more power than did the victims who had fallen screaming at the alters of the priests of his long-vanished culture. 

De Guise-Montcalm was the first to fall, for even her for all his skill could not long ward off both Angelus and Hatukani, his head falling to the ground in a shower of dust that was barely noticed amid the carnage. Dracula fell then, Vost skewering him through in a parody of his preferred method of execution. The vampire lord of literary legend gasped in pain, his sword falling to the ground with a crash that none could hear, his black eyes wide, seeing as he could his mortality for the first time since he had fought the Turks centuries before in the shining arc of steel used by Vost to take the head from him. He could not use his power here, and he fell, this time forever.

Vost turned just in time to block both Angelus and Hatukani; for all the _samurai_ skill of the Japanese vampiress, she was not the equal of the sadistic German, and Angelus was little more than an irritant, sent flying across the room with a grunt of pain, to be forgotten by Vost until he could deal with the scion of Jounn'I, whose eyes widened with fear, meeting for the first time in her long memory an opponent of equal determination but, worse, superior skill. She weaved her defence desperately, but his dark eyes never wavered in concentration as he pushed her inexorably back.

Serim had had her fill of Drusilla, whose arrogance was infuriating. The Lord of Aurelius fought furiously, but she could not penetrate the defences of the Moroccan, and did not even have the skill to recognise that Serim was toying with her, keeping her alive long enough for Patricius to deal with Jur'Khan Chung, who was pressed up against the wall of the cavern by the sublime skill of the Lord of Akhenaton, who felt with pain the death of de Guise-Montcalm while, ten feet away, Buffy and Spike neared the end of their fights; neither opponent was worthy of them, all they had was age, and that was not enough against the fury of the two lovers.

'I've had enough of you,' Serim growled at Drusilla, and twisted. The eyes of the vampiress opened wide with horror as Serim dived to the ground and rolled with incredible speed, her scimitar coming back around as she came up, slicing Drusilla across the midsection almost to her spine. The wound was not mortal, not for a vampire, but the scream of Drusilla's pain as she sank to the floor shattered the eerie silence where before there had only been the clash of metal.

Spike finished off Khilthilezi easily in time to hear the scream of his Sire, and he turned. Though he could no longer feel the bond that had sustained him through a century, neither could he easily ignore her pain. He watched her sink to the floor as Buffy decapitated Chihiltipec, who fell unnoticed by her Lord, who fought no longer for power, or even vengeance, but simply to survive. Angelus raised his dazed head from the wall, feeling the agony of his Childe and Lord, and launched himself through the air, directly at Serim, barely missing Vost, who ended his toying with Hatukani quickly. He, too, had felt the death of de Guise-Montcalm, and would miss the Angevin Frenchman, in whom he had discovered a kindred spirit. The best he could do was deal with his killer, which he did quickly, though he was not able to turn in time to stop Angelus.

The Scourge of Europe crashed into Serim, bearing her to the ground as Drusilla struggled vainly to rise, the awful wound in her side not yet starting to heal. Angelus brought his sword around to take the head from Serim, who was momentarily stunned. The eyes of the master sadist gleamed with anticipation as he swung.

The impact of his sword against Spike's was terrific, jarring. With no less energy, Spike had launched himself also across the room, leaving Buffy, who was as yet unaware of the plenitude of her power. The Slayer of Slayers was able to block the blow that would have killed Serim, though he did not do it for her. A century of rage infused Spike, who was no longer retarded by any hint of deference for his grandsire, and he fought with all of his energy against the older vampire. The hatred of Angelus was no less intense, and they fought to finally end their age old rivalry. 

It seemed an eternity to them as they fought, though Buffy and Vost, watching carefully, knew that it lasted a bare minute. Spike could see nothing but the hatred that he bore for the man who had blazed the trail that he had been all his life forced to follow, nothing but the desire to end the life of the one creature against whose perverted ethics of death Spike's rebellion had made him what he was. Their swords clashed continually. Angelus' hopes of a quick victory were dashed; he had been contained too long by the iron cages of Angel's soul, and it was not for nothing that Spike had battled so long with Buffy, without learned to fight with more skill than Angelus could ever have imparted. Spike was a warrior, Angelus an assassin. Strong enough when he had the upper hand, he was unused to fighting on equal terms. All Spike's rage gave him a strength that he never thought he might possess, and grimly he pushed Angelus back.

It would have ended quickly enough, had Drusilla not chosen that moment to strike at her errant offspring. Though nearly crippled, she was not completely helpless, and she raised her sword.

It took Spike in the leg, and Serim, nearby though still slightly dazed, could have done nothing about it. Spike snarled in anger at the pain, more an annoyance than a hindrance, and would have rounded on his Sire, had not Angelus then pushed forward. Distracted, Spike could not block the blow aimed for his neck with all the hate and fury that his grandsire could summon, expressed in an animalistic growl of pure malevolence. In that moment, Spike saw his death.

But not his lover, whose sword took Angelus directly in the chest, driving him the ground with a snarl of agony. She stood over him, debating, with a quick grin at Spike while, behind, Serim rose to stand with Vost. 

Spike turned, limping slightly, turned to Drusilla, who had managed to rise, her sword red from Spike's blood, but it was her last throw of the dice. The wound inflicted by Serim would have weakened her for days, and she could see in Spike's eyes that she had barely seconds. There was nothing of affection, and barely anything of recognition in the blue eyes of the vampire who had loved her completely and cared for her with perfect attention for more than a century, protecting her from every impulse of enmity her delusional insanity provoked, and at the end almost sacrificed his life to restore her to health. He turned, and raised his sword. In that moment, for the first time since she had gained all the power that had enabled her to mount the failed challenge for dominance for which she had risked everything, and now lost equally as much at his hands by his betrayal, she knew fear.

'Goodbye, Dru,' he said softly.

'William,' Patricius called from the far side of the room, where he stood, with Jur'Khan Chung in his knees in front, facing forward, a gaping wound in his chest enabling his unbeating heart to be see. Holding his sword in one hand, Patricius leaned forward and, without expression on his face, reached deep into the barrel chest of the Mongol, who screamed with agony, then crumpled to the same dust in which so many of his victims now lay. Beyond the cavern, a thousand or more vampires descended from Jounn'I fell, without knowing why.

His heart followed a moment later, and the Roman casually blew the dust from his hand, striding forward with a purpose that might have been threatening had all there not known his intent.

Angelus tried to rise, but was sent crashing to the ground with a quick, contemptuous sneer by Vost, who stood then beside Serim, waiting. 

'What?' Spike asked of the Roman, who walked alongside him as Drusilla stared at the two of them, Buffy right behind her, waiting to finish it if they would not. She would not suffer the vampiress to live, nor could she. 

Behind her, the longsword of Thoikaris started to glow; white, not black like the others.

'Leave her to me, if you would,' Patricius asked softly, his eyes never leaving those of Drusilla. 'She has done more to wound me than ever she did to you.'

Spike's eyes flickered to those of Buffy's. His lover nodded, and they stepped forward into each other's arms, their embrace a sweet celebration of their survival, though still neither of them saw the longsword of Thoikaris. Never in either of their lives had either felt so close to anyone else as they did now, for before there had not been time for them to celebrate the formal consummation of their union. Bonded together forever in a way that Spike, for all of his adoration of the petite form in his arms, could never have hoped, and Buffy could never have understood until this day. Human love magnified a hundred fold by vampire determination and patience, they leaned against each other without words, for no mere words in all the languages of humanity, living or dead, could have expressed the depths of their feeling for each other. 

Patricius knelt in front of Drusilla in anticipation for he, too, had once known such love as was being celebrated in front of him.

'You took from me the one thing for which I lived for two and a half millennia,' he said to her, though his voice was colder than the air around him, and without expression, his face blank. Vengeance was an infertile thing, breeding nothing but its own increase, and it was cold comfort at the end, he knew. Yet, though it achieved nothing, it demanded an answer to its call. And it was an answer the strength of defiance to deny could never have been expected from the magnitude of such a crime as that committed by her against him.

'Die,' he whispered, and brought his sword around.

Her dust fell to join with so much more as Patricius rose. He wanted now nothing more than to join her, but not yet, he knew as he heard Angelus' scream of agony from behind him.

Unlike Buffy and Spike, who saw nothing but each others' eyes, he could see the glowing sword behind them, and he knew what it meant; he had been told by his Sire, so many thousands of years before. He had nothing left for which to live, he knew, but he had something left to do.

Walking past Buffy and Spike, who still stood in each others arms contemplating the eternity together that lay in front of them as Angel picked himself up from the floor, his soul again in place and Angelus gone now forever with the demise of the Lord of his Order, Patricius walked to the centre circle that had been guarded what seemed an eternity before by hot flames.

Sighing, he saw the sword which was never meant for him to wield, and he knew nothing of what would happen were he to touch it. He remembered the snarl of fury with which Thoikaris had been cast into the void, raging that she would return, with every fibre of the power which she had inherited from the First she would not allow her enemies to be victorious in the war which he himself, alone of the company here both alive and dead, remembered. He had been the most junior of the vampires who had stood that day, a mere two hundred years old beside Cornokalen of Aurelius and Qui Chi of Jounn'I, but he had fought with all the controlled aggression that had set his people on the road to an Empire whose bones were still visible today, whose legacy still drove western civilisation and had, by the extension of Europe to every area of the world, influenced history in a manner in which none alive then could have anticipated. That one small city in one peninsula could have done that much, _his_ city, was still a source of pride to him, pride that shone in his dark eyes as he reached down.

So focused was he on the sword, so focused were Buffy and Spike on each other, and so focused were Vost and Serim on the panting agony of Angel as his soul was returned to him with a wrench worse than anything which he had endured when he had lost it, that none of them saw who entered the cavern.

Patricius did not see her, though he felt her, and looked up with a level of surprise on his face which he had never revealed since he had been human.

Buffy pulled away from Spike, who also felt a shiver in his spine, and they turned, their hands still entwined, as they would be for the eternity to which they both looked forward.

Vost, Serim and Angel slowly turned, not believing what they felt.

Resplendent in black leather, and projecting such power steeped in a malevolence ageless in its constancy and determination, the faint light of the cavern seeming to shy away from her as she walked with a malicious smile on her face Thoikaris, the vampire queen so far beyond both Lords and Masters in the cavern with her, walked nonchalantly into view.

'Faith,' Buffy breathed.


End file.
